Mills, William Hobson (1873-1959)

English organic chemist who worked mainly on stereochemistry and the synthesis of cyanine dyes.

Mills was born in London and studied at Cambridge, where he was professor from 1912. He also collected 2,200 specimens of the British bramble plant Rubus fructiosus for the university.

Mills and his co-workers investigated cyanine dyestuffs for preparing photographic emulsions, mainly for use by the military in World War I. Other early research concerned stereochemistry, particularly optical isomerism - the phenomenon in which pairs of (usually organic) compounds differ only in the arrangements of their atoms in space. In the 1920s he investigated substituted derivatives of naphthalene, quinolene, and benzene.