Thomas Melvill(e) (1726 – December 1753) was a Scottish natural philosopher, who was active in the fields of spectroscopy and astronomy.
[1] The son of Helen Whytt and the Rev Andrew Melville, minister of Monimail (d. 29 July 1736),[2] Melvill was a student at the University of Glasgow.
In 1749, with Alexander Wilson, his landlord and later the first professor of astronomy at the University, they made the first recorded use of kites in meteorology.
He most notably delivered a lecture entitled Observations on light and colours to the Medical Society of Edinburgh in 1752, in which he described what has been seen as the first flame test.
Because of this, he is sometimes described as the father of flame emission spectroscopy, though he did not identify the source of the line, or propose his experiment as a method of analysis.