Edward Divers FRS (27 November 1837 – 8 April 1912) was a British experimental chemist who rose to prominence despite being visually impaired from young age.

Stenhouse regarded defective vision of Divers too serious a hindrance to admit of the attainment of success in a chemistry career, though he changed this opinion later.

In 1854 an assistant vacancy opened with Edmund Ronalds (1819–1889) which Divers accepted and then continued in the same capacity under Thomas Henry Rowney (1817–1894).

He had studied in 1863 the spontaneous change which guncotton undergoes with formation of gelatinous acids, and published two papers in 1871 on nitrites where he announces his discovery of hyponitrites.

In 1886 the college was incorporated with the Tokyo Imperial University, where Divers held the Chair of Inorganic Chemistry until his return to England in 1899.

During his first seven or eight years in Japan due to administrative and teaching duties, as well as numerous requests from the Department of Public Works to analyse samples of various minerals and noble metals.

As a result, his first papers after leaving England were on Japanese minerals, and these were communicated to the meetings of the British Association held in York in 1881.

It was in the course of this work, on 24 November 1884, that Divers lost vision in his right eye as he was badly cut by pieces of glass resulting from the sudden bursting of the bottle with phosphorus oxychloride.

He greatly encouraged the spirit of experimental research among his pupils including Jōkichi Takamine, who was the first to prepare pure adrenaline, and Masataka Ogawa who discovered "nipponium" (later found to be rhenium).

He was much respected in Japan, particularly by Itō Hirobumi, who, in the early days of the Engineering College, was the Minister of Public Works, and thus came in frequent contact with Divers.

The elder, Edith, being married to Count Labry, a military attache to the French Legation in Tokyo, and the younger, Ella, to E. W. Tilden, a resident of Kobe.