Richard Laming

Richard Laming was a British surgeon, natural philosopher, inventor, chemist and industrialist, born on 17 August 1799 and thought to have been a native of Margate. He qualified for membership of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1825 and set up a medical practice in London, which apparently ended around 1842 after he had moved to Paris in 1838. In his spare time he developed theories of electricity, and between 1838 and 1851 he published papers proposing that atoms contain sub-atomic particles of unit electrical charge arranged in shells, an idea that attracted little interest from the Royal Society. Returning to England he turned to chemistry and the coal-gas industry and took out patents for ammonia purification, a continuous recuperator and the Laming process for removing hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide from coal gas. He retired around 1865 to the south coast and died at Arundel, Sussex, on 3 May 1879.