Eric Rideal

Sir Eric Keightley Rideal (11 April 1890 – 25 September 1974 ) was a British physical chemist. He worked on a wide range of subjects, including electrochemistry, chemical kinetics, catalysis, electrophoresis, colloids and surface chemistry. He is best known for the Eley–Rideal mechanism, which he proposed in 1938 with Daniel D. Eley. He is also known for the textbook that he authored, An Introduction to Surface Chemistry, In 1907 he won a scholarship in Natural Sciences to Trinity Hall, Cambridge.

Rideal remained at Cambridge for the next 26 years, becoming Professor of Colloid Science in 1930, the same year he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1947, Rideal gave the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, entitled 'Chemical Reactions: How They Work'.

In 1949, Rideal was one of the founding editors of the journal Advances in Catalysis.

He was knighted in the 1951 King's Birthday Honours List for his services to the Ministry of Supply during World War II.

Also in 1951, he delivered the Bakerian Lecture with the title 'On Reactions in Monolayers'. Between 1951 and 1967 Rideal received honorary degrees from the universities of Dublin, Birmingham, Brunel, Belfast, Turin, and Bonn. the Society of Chemical Industry (1945 to 1946), and the Chemical Society (1950 to 1952).

Later years Rideal died on 25 September 1974 in West Kensington, London. His obituary was published in The Times.

Legacy Rideal's name is still honoured today, with bursaries, grants, lectures and conferences named for him. The travel bursaries are administered jointly in the form of the Rideal Trust by the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Society of Chemical Industry.

The Tadion–Rideal Prize for Molecular Science is an annual grant awarded by King's College London since 1983.

The Sir Eric Rideal Lecture is a lectureship awarded every year since 1970 by the Society of Chemical Industry.

The Rideal Conference is a triennial UK research conference on surface science and catalysis. It started in 1962 as the Chemisorption and Catalysis Conference and was renamed in his honour in 1971,

Selected works Catalysis in Theory and Practice (1919, co-author) Industrial electrometallurgy (1919) Ozone (1920) An Introduction to Surface Chemistry (1926) Interfacial Phenomena (1963, co-author) Concepts in Catalysis (1968) Sixty Years of Chemistry (1970)