James Riddick Partington (30 June 1886 – 9 October 1965) was a British chemist and historian of chemistry who published multiple books and articles in scientific magazines.
He was awarded an 1851 Research Fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851,[5] and worked for several years with Walther Nernst in Berlin, where they studied the specific heat of gases.
It was there that Partington met a student named Marian Jones whom he taught and supervised for a master's degree in supersaturated solutions.
Later the two chemists turned to the question of the oxidation of nitrogen to form nitric acid and investigated the Haber-Bosch process that the Germans were pursuing.
Captain Partington was appointed a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the Military Division for this latter work.
[8] After the war came to an end in 1919, he returned to the University of Manchester to get his doctorate and was appointed professor of chemistry at Queen Mary College, London which he remained until 1951.
[13] At the end of 1964, following his housekeeper's retirement, unable to look after himself, he joined relatives in the salt-mining town of Northwich in Cheshire, where he died on 9 October 1965.
He regularly published multiple papers a year on a variety of topics including inorganic and physical chemistry.