Friedrich Accum

Origins and early life

Friedrich Accum was born in Bückeburg, in the little German principality of Schaumburg-Lippe, on 29 March 1769, the son of Herz Marcus, a Jewish soap maker who had converted to Christianity in 1755 and taken the name Christian Accum — a name, the family's tradition held, formed from the Hebrew 'akum', the word for a non-Jew, to mark his passage — and of Judith La Motte, a Huguenot; this fiche rests on that Jewish-born father, and notes that he is not the Berlin philosopher Marcus Herz of the same name.

Work and career

Trained in a Hanover pharmacy, Accum went to London in 1793, and there became one of the first professional chemists of the industrial age: an assistant at the Royal Institution in its first years, a lecturer whose courses at the Surrey Institution filled the hall, a dealer in apparatus and a writer of practical manuals that taught a generation to do chemistry. He was the scientific advocate of gas lighting, chemist to the Gas Light and Coke Company from 1812, whose Practical Treatise on Gas-Light of 1815 helped persuade London and then Europe that a city could be lit by coal gas.

His fame came in 1820 with A Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons, whose cover bore a skull and the biblical warning 'There is death in the pot': it named the tricks of the trade — alum in bread, copper in pickles, lead in wine, sloe leaves in tea, sulphuric acid in vinegar — and, worse, it named the tradesmen convicted of them, and it sold out in a month.

Later years

The retaliation came within the year: accused of tearing pages from books in the Royal Institution's library, he faced prosecution and fled to Germany in 1821, where he taught at the Industrial Institute and the Academy of Architecture in Berlin until his death on 28 June 1838. The food-safety laws of the Victorian age began with his book.