In the six months between December 1828 and May 1829, three of the foremost English chemists and natural philosophers of the early nineteenth century died: William Hyde Wollaston, Thomas Young and Humphry Davy. Of these Davy has been and continues to be extensively studied, Young rather less so and, until this book, Wollaston hardly at all – possibly because, unlike the other two, no near contemporary life-and-letters was published. From the mid-1970s onwards, working towards this biography of Wollaston became Mel Usselman's lifelong scholarly ambition as professor of chemistry at the University of Western Ontario. Sadly, a week after he had signed off the dust jacket he died in March 2015 following a short illness and so never saw the end point of his life's work.

Wollaston was born in 1766, the son of an Anglican country vicar. After studying at Cambridge University (MD 1793), he practised medicine in Huntingdonshire and Suffolk, before moving around 1797 to London, where he shortly afterwards gave up medicine, turning instead mostly to metallurgy. While at university he had begun working with the professor of chemistry, Smithson Tennant, on platinum. He continued this work in London in some secrecy, finding a way to make large quantities of very pure samples of the metal. In the process he made himself a considerable fortune (which attracted some sniffy comments from various members of the elite scientific community) and discovered two chemical elements, palladium and rhodium.

While much of the book is given over to detailed discussion of Wollaston's metallurgy and related topics, Usselman does cover all aspects of his life career. These include his work on physiology, crystallography and the camera lucida, amongst much else. Furthermore, Wollaston took part in more theoretical discussions, for example about the status of atoms. Despite the criticisms that his platinum work attracted, Wollaston was highly regarded by his peers for the accuracy and meticulousness of his work – a comparison with Henry Cavendish (which Usselman does not make) in this regard would not be entirely out of place, aside from Wollaston's lack of mathematics. Like Cavendish, Wollaston played a significant role in the organization of the Royal Society of London, rising to become interim president for a few months following the death of Joseph Banks. However, evidently a sensible man, Wollaston declined to oppose Davy, who badly wanted the job, at the 1820 election. Unlike Cavendish, however, Wollaston, though he never married, was a sociable person, as Usselman makes clear – visiting friends and colleagues, fishing with Davy and so on.

Taking forty years to produce a book is an impressive feat and in this case usefully puts Wollaston on the historian's map. There is a downside, however, to taking so long to produce a text and that is that in some cases the changing historiography of the last few decades is not adequately reflected. To take one example, the discussion of Wollaston's role in the plagiarism row between him and Michael Faraday following the latter's discovery of electromagnetic rotations in September 1821 is inadequate. All the letters cited are from nineteenth-century sources (thus missing many that were not then published) and there is no reference to David Gooding's exemplary studies of Faraday's rotation work. Usselmen then uses this incident as the sole ground which led to the row between Davy and Faraday over the latter's nomination to fellowship of the Royal Society of London. But this also included Faraday's liquefaction of chlorine in 1823, for which Davy made far stronger proprietorial claims than did Wollaston for rotations. All this illustrates some of the pitfalls of a biography if one concentrates simply on an individual, rather than investigate the overall context in which he or she operated. One forms the impression, I hope not unfairly, that once a section of the text was written, it was not revised in light of developing historical understanding.

I don't want to end on such a critical note, but to stress that, whatever its limitations, Usselman has given us book which draws full attention to a key figure in early nineteenth-century science who has been seriously neglected since his death, and I very much hope that it will encourage future historians to integrate Wollaston into their contextual accounts of the period.