Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 49.djvu/207

 Whitehall. He joined in sending out Henry Hudson to discover a North-West Passage in April 1610. He died on 25 April 1611. By his will, dated 18 April 1611, he gave liberally to the hospitals, 20l. to forty poor scholars in Cambridge, and 50l. to the Haberdashers' Company to be lent to a young freeman gratis for two years.

Romney married Rebecca, only daughter of Robert Taylor, alderman of the city of London, by whom he had six sons and two daughters. The younger daughter, Susan, married Sir Francis Carew, K.B. His wife died on 31 Dec. 1596. She gave four exhibitions of 12l. each to the Haberdashers' Company, two at Emmanuel College and two at Sidney-Sussex College, Cambridge; 6l. a year to two freemen of the company, and 3l. a year to four poor widows.



RONALDS, EDMUND (1819–1889), chemist, son of Edmund Ronalds, a London merchant, and his wife Eliza, daughter of James Anderson, LL.D., and nephew of Sir [q. v.], was born in London in 1819. After leaving school, Ronalds studied successively at Giessen, where he graduated Ph.D., at Jena, Berlin, Heidelberg, and Paris. In 1840 he returned to England, and held the lectureships in chemistry successively at St. Mary's Hospital and the Middlesex Hospital. In 1849 he was appointed professor of chemistry in the Queen's College, Galway. He was secretary of the Chemical Society from 1848 to 1850, and edited the first two volumes of its ‘Quarterly Journal’ for 1849 and 1850. He resigned his chair at Galway in 1856, in order to take over the Bonnington chemical works, where the raw products of the Edinburgh gas-works were dealt with. In a letter to Sir Francis Ronalds he wrote in 1858 that he was ‘completely ignored as a tradesman by the savants of Edinburgh.’ In 1878 he retired from business, and set up a private research-laboratory in Edinburgh, to which he welcomed any chemist. After suffering for some years from ill-health, he died at Bonnington House on 9 Sept. 1889, leaving a widow and six children.

The Royal Society's ‘Catalogue’ contains a list of four papers by Ronalds, in the most important of which he showed that the sulphur and phosphorus in the human urine exist partly in a less oxidised state than as sulphate and phosphate (Philosophical Transactions, 1846, p. 461). In collaboration with (1816–1867) [q. v.], he translated and edited Knapp's ‘Lehrbuch der chemischen Technologie,’ of which they published the first edition during 1848–51. A second edition was rewritten, so as to form a new work, but Ronalds collaborated only with respect to the first two parts, published in 1855.



RONALDS, FRANCIS (1788–1873), inventor of the electric telegraph and meteorologist, son of Francis Ronalds, a London merchant, and of his wife, Jane, daughter of William Field, was born in London on 21 Feb. 1788. A nephew, [q. v.], is separately noticed. The Ronalds family originally came from Scotland, but had settled at Brentford, where St. Lawrence's Church contains memorials of many of its members (, Antiquities of Brentford, p. 65). Ronalds was educated at a private school at Cheshunt by the Rev. E. Cogan. At an early age he displayed a taste for experiment, and he acquired great skill later in practical mechanics and draughtsmanship. Under the influence of Jean André de Luc (1727–1817), whose acquaintance he made in 1814, he began to devote himself to practical electricity. In 1814 and 1815 he published several papers on electricity in Tilloch's ‘Philosophical Magazine,’ one of which records an ingenious use of De Luc's ‘electric column’ as a motive power for a clock.

Ronalds's name is chiefly remembered as the inventor of an electric telegraph. Since 1753, when the first proposal for an electric telegraph worked by statical electricity was made by a writer signing ‘C. M.’ (said to be [q. v.]) in the ‘Scots Magazine’ (xv. 73), successive advances had been made abroad by Volta, Le Sage, Lomond, Cavallo, Salva, and others; but much was needed to perfect the invention. In 1816 Ronalds, in the garden of his house in the Upper Mall, Hammersmith (subsequently known as Kelmscott House, and occupied by William Morris the poet), laid down eight miles of wire, insulated in glass tubes, and surrounded by a wooden trough filled with pitch, so that the wire was capable of being