Hinshelwood, Cyril Norman (1897-1967)

English chemist who shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1956 for his work on chemical chain reactions. He also studied the chemistry of bacterial growth. He was knighted in 1948.

Hinshelwood was born in London and studied at Oxford, where he became professor in 1937. During World War I he worked in the Department of Explosives at the Royal Ordnance Factory in Queensferry, Scotland.

Studying gas reactions and the decomposition of solid substances in the presence and absence of catalysts, Hinshelwood went on to demonstrate that many reactions can be explained in terms of a series - a chain - of interdependent stages. At high temperatures the chain reactions of some elements accelerate the process to explosion point. He provided experimental evidence for the role of activated molecules in initiating the chain reaction. In his bacterial-growth experiments, too, he considered that all the various chemical reactions that occurred were interconnected and mutually dependent, the product of one reaction becoming the reactant for the next.

He also investigated reaction kinetics in aqueous and nonaqueous solutions, and published Kinetics of Chemical Change (1926).