Henry Edward Armstrong

Henry Edward Armstrong FRS

Life and work Armstrong was born the son of Richard Armstrong, a commission agent and importer, and Mary Ann Biddle. He lived most of his life in Lewisham, a suburb of London.

Armstrong pursued further studies under Hermann Kolbe at Leipzig, earning a PhD in 1869 for work on "acids of sulfur." He returned to London and worked under Augustus Matthiessen in the medical school of St Bartholomew's Hospital, in charge of chemistry classes for students taking the London degree.

He had already started on the systematic synthesis, degradation, and structural constitution of many naphthalene derivatives in 1881, building on earlier work on benzene derivatives and Erlenmeyer's proposal for the structure of naphthalene. W. P. Wynne was his most important collaborator; their 263 naphthalene samples, accrued over several decades, are now preserved at Imperial College as the Armstrong-Wynne Collection. This research on naphthalene gave much impetus to the synthetic dye industry.

Armstrong's later researches dealt with terpenes, particularly camphor, with water purification, helping to eradicate typhoid fever, and with crystallography.

In 1887, Armstrong became interested in classifying substituents of benzene in terms of their meta- and ortho-para directing influences. It was in a footnote to an article on that theme in 1890 that his centric formula for benzene first appeared. His six affinities acting within a cycle predated both the discovery of the electron and modern theories of aromaticity. Armstrong recognised that affinities have direction and are not merely point particles, and so he might be said to have anticipated parts of the wave mechanical theories of the 1920s.

He died at his home in Granville Park, Lewisham.

Family Armstrong married Frances Louisa Lavers on 30 August 1877. Davy Medal (1911) Messel medal of the Society of Chemical Industry (1922) Albert Medal (1930)