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George Frederick Ansell (4 March 1826 – 21 December 1880) was an English scientific inventor, chemist and assayer, and author of a standard work on the Royal Mint.

Biography

Ansell was born at

Carshalton Carshalton () is a town, with a historic village centre, in south London, England, within the London Borough of Sutton. It is situated south-southwest of Charing Cross, in the valley of the River Wandle, one of the sources of which is Carshalto ...

on 4 March 1826. He was apprenticed for four years to a surgeon, and studied medicine with the intention of adopting a medical life as his profession, but abandoned it for chemistry. After undergoing a course of instruction at the

Royal College of Chemistry The Royal College of Chemistry: the laboratories. Lithograph The Royal College of Chemistry (RCC) was a college originally based on Oxford Street in central London, England. It operated between 1845 and 1872. The original building was designed ...

, he became an assistant to August Wilhelm Hofmann at the

Royal School of Mines The Royal School of Mines comprises the departments of Earth Science and Engineering, and Materials at Imperial College London. The Centre for Advanced Structural Ceramics and parts of the London Centre for Nanotechnology and Department of Bioe ...

. In 1854, he gave lectures in chemistry at the Panopticon in Leicester Square, London, but that institution did not last long, and Ansell accepted from Thomas Graham, in November 1856, a situation in the Royal Mint. In 1859, the Royal Mint rejected a batch of gold that was found to be too brittle for the minting of gold sovereigns. Analysis revealed the presence of small amounts of antimony, arsenic and lead. With Ansell's background in chemistry, he persuaded the Royal Mint to allow him to experiment with the alloy and was ultimately able to produce 167,539 gold sovereigns. The only identifying feature to single out an 'Ansell' sovereign is the presence of an additional line on the ribbon, used to tie back Victoria's hair. Today, only 15 - 25 examples of this coin are known to exist and are therefore extremely rare & collectable. He remained at the Royal Mint for more than ten years, when differences of opinion between him and its chiefs led to the loss of his position.W. P. Courtney, rev. Robert Brown
"Ansell, George Frederick (1826–1880)"
''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', Oxford University Press, 2004. Accessed 10 February 2017. A contemporary history suggests his criticisms influenced the

Coinage Act 1870 The Coinage Act 1870 (33 & 34 Vict c 10) is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It stated the metric weights of British coins. For example, it defined the weight of the sovereign as 7.98805 grams (about 123.27747 grains). The Act was ...

. After his retirement, and until his death on 21 December 1880, he practised as an analyst. Ansell devoted much attention to the dangers arising from

firedamp Firedamp is any flammable gas found in coal mines, typically coalbed methane. It is particularly found in areas where the coal is bituminous. The gas accumulates in pockets in the coal and adjacent strata and when they are penetrated the releas ...

in collieries, and made a valuable series of experiments on the subject in the Ince Hall colliery near

Wigan Wigan ( ) is a large town in Greater Manchester, England, on the River Douglas. The town is midway between the two cities of Manchester, to the south-east, and Liverpool, to the south-west. Bolton lies to the north-east and Warrington t ...

. The ‘firedamp indicator’, which he subsequently patented, was adopted with considerable success in many of the collieries on the continent. For the ''cyclopædia'' of

Charles Tomlinson Alfred Charles Tomlinson, CBE (8 January 1927 – 22 August 2015) was an English poet, translator, academic, and illustrator. He was born in Penkhull, and grew up in Basford, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire. Life After attending Longton High Sc ...

he wrote a treatise on coining — one hundred copies of which were struck off for private circulation — and his work on the ''Royal Mint'' was an amplification of this article. This volume first appeared in 1870, and was reissued in the next year; its popularity was somewhat marred by the introduction of the narrative of his quarrels with his colleagues in the office, but it contained much information not to be found elsewhere. Several articles on the subjects in which he took most interest were contributed by him to the seventh edition of

Andrew Ure Andrew Ure FRS (18 May 1778 – 2 January 1857) was a Scottish physician, chemist, scriptural geologist, and early business theorist who founded the Garnet Hill Observatory. He was a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal S ...

's ‘Dictionary of Arts’."George Frederick Ansell - obituary", ''The Times'', 25 December 1880. His daughter Gertrude Mary Ansell was a noted suffragette and

animal rights Animal rights is the philosophy according to which many or all Animal consciousness, sentient animals have moral worth that is independent of their Utilitarianism, utility for humans, and that their most basic interests—such as avoiding s ...

activist.

Publications

*''The Royal Mint: its working, conduct, and operations, fully and practically explained'', 1870

References

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ansell, George Frederick English inventors 1826 births 1880 deaths