Cyril Norman Hinshelwood
1897–1967 · British chemist and amateur painter
Sir Cyril Norman Hinshelwood (London, 1897 - 1967) was a British physical chemist, awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1956 for his studies of the kinetics of chemical reactions. He is chiefly remembered for science, but he was also an amateur painter, a side of his life recorded only briefly in the sources and worth a place in his biography. Most of his life was spent in England, with Oxford at the centre of his career.
Born in London, he spent part of his childhood in Canada and returned in 1905 to a flat in Chelsea, where he lived for the rest of his life. He studied at Oxford, where he was a tutor at Trinity College from 1921 to 1937, and from that year held the Dr Lee's Professorship of Chemistry. During the First World War he worked as a chemist in an explosives factory. With Harold Warris Thompson he studied the explosive reaction between hydrogen and oxygen and described the phenomenon of chain reaction.
As a painter, the sources record with some precision only his scenes of Oxford and several portraits of university figures. Among them are those of Harold Hartley, his doctoral supervisor, and Herbert Blakiston, President of Trinity College. The first now belongs to the Royal Society and the second to Trinity College, which also holds a number of his other paintings. There is no evidence that he worked as an artist professionally. Painting shared his leisure with his collection of Chinese pottery and his reading of foreign literature, and he spoke seven classical and modern languages.
His scientific legacy is broad. The Langmuir-Hinshelwood process in heterogeneous catalysis also bears his name. He served as President of the Royal Society from 1955 to 1960 and was knighted in 1948. His work on the chemical changes in the bacterial cell proved important for later research on antibiotics and therapeutic agents. A lunar crater carries his name in his memory.