James Keir

James Keir FRS (20 September 1735 – 11 October 1820) was a Scottish chemist, geologist, industrialist, and inventor, and an important member of the Lunar Society of Birmingham.

While in the army Keir wrote a treatise on the art of war, which was accidentally burnt at his publishers, and a pamphlet addressed to the Marquis of Granby in favour of the sale of commissions.

Early in the same year Keir completed his translation of Macquer's Dictionnaire de Chymie, with additions and notes, published at London in two quarto volumes.

In 1778 Keir gave up his glass business to undertake, in the absence of Boulton and Watt, the sole charge of their engineering works at Soho, Birmingham near Handsworth.

The alloy, which Keir called "Eldorado metal," originally intended for sheathing ship bottoms, but later adopted for architectural fixtures.

[5] In 1780 Keir, in conjunction with Alexander Blair (then retired from the army), established a chemical works at Tipton, near Dudley, for the manufacture of alkali from the sodium and potassium sulphates,[6] to which he afterwards added a soap manufactory.

[7] When Joseph Priestley came to Birmingham in 1780, he found an able assistant in Keir, who had discovered the distinction between carbon dioxide gas and atmospheric air.

In February 1811 Keir forwarded to the Geological Society "An Account of the Strata in sinking a Pit in Tividale Colliery", accompanied by a number of specimens.

On 19 December 1807, while Keir was staying with Blair at Hilton Park, his house at West Bromwich was burnt, though most of his books and papers were saved.

By his marriage in 1770 to Susanna Harvey (1747–1802) he had an only child, Amelia (1780–1857), who in 1801 married John Lewis Moilliet of Geneva and later Abberley, afterwards merchant and banker of Birmingham.

Ten years later he wrote Reflections on the Invasion of Great Britain by the French Armies; on the Mode of Defence; and on the useful application of the National Levies (1803).