John Wright (inventor)

John Wright (1808 to 1844) was an English surgeon in Birmingham who is remembered less for his medical practice than for a chemical invention. Born on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent, he was apprenticed to a doctor in Rotherham and completed his medical training in Edinburgh, Paris and London before settling in the Bordesley district of Birmingham in 1833, in the heart of the metalworking trades. Experimenting with electricity in his spare time, and prompted by Carl Wilhelm Scheele's work on the cyanides of gold and silver, he showed that a solution of those metals in potassium cyanide made an effective electrolyte that gave a good gold or silver coating. He sold the rights to the plating firm of Elkington, which patented the process in 1840 and paid him a lump sum and later royalties. The method replaced more dangerous earlier techniques and became widely used. He died young, in 1844, after falling from his carriage.