Emeléus, Harry Julius (1903- )

English chemist who made wide-ranging investigations in inorganic chemistry, studying particularly nonmetallic elements and their compounds. He worked on chemical kinetics and studied the hydrides of silicon and the halogen fluorides. Emeléus was born in London and studied at Imperial College, London, and Karlsruhe University, Germany. He was professor of inorganic chemistry at Cambridge 1945-70. Emeléus began his researches with a study of the phosphorescence of white phosphorus. His spectrographic investigations of phosphorescence provided new information about the mechanisms of combustion reactions. Emeléus showed that naturally occurring water exhibits a small variation in deuterium content, and that distillation, freezing, and adsorption methods can all effect some degree of separation of the two isotopic forms. In 1945 he started studying the halogen fluorides. By 1959 he was working with the fluorides of vanadium, niobium, tantalum, and tungsten and much of his research in the 1960s concerned the fluoralkyl derivatives of metals. Emeléus summarized much of his work in The Chemistry of Fluorine and its Compounds 1969.