McKie Papers

Papers of Douglas McKie

Closed for repackaging, listing and cataloguing. Prospective researchers are welcome to enquire for further information, but access will not be possible until the collection has been sorted and listed.

Douglas McKie was born in Tredegar in Wales in 1896. His father was James McKie, an officer in the South Wales Borderers, and his mother was Janet Moseley. He originally intended a career in the army and trained at Sandhurst before being commissioned in the South Wales Borderers in 1916, during the First World War. McKie was injured early in the Battle of Paschendaele in July 1917 and spent more than a year making an incomplete recovery from his wounds before rejoining his regiment in 1919 as part of the British forces in occupied Germany. He suffered from periods of ill health throughout the rest of his life, partly as a result of his wartime injuries.Resigning his commission in 1920, McKie studied chemistry at University College London where he graduated in 1923. He studied for his PhD, which he received in 1927, under F G Donnan researching gas absorption. In 1925 he was appointed part time demonstrator in the Chemistry Department and part time Assistant Lecturer at the newly-created Department of History and Philosophy of Science (then called the Department of the Principles, History and Method of Science, headed by A Woolf). The latter was where he remained for the rest of his career, except for a brief hiatus during the Second World War when his department was closed and evacuated. During this time, McKie returned to lecturing in the Chemistry Department which continued in a reduced capacity at the University of North Wales at Bangor. In 1945 when the Department of History and Philosophy of Science was re-opened at UCL he became Reader and in 1957 succeeded to the Chair, where he remained until his retirement in 1964.McKie's main areas of research interest were seventeenth and eighteenth century theories of heat, combustion and related topics, centred around the work of Lavoisier and Joseph Black. His major publications included "The Discovery of Specific and Latent Heat" (1935); "Thomas Cochrane s Notes from Dr Black s Lectures on Chemistry 1767/8" (1936); "Antoine Lavoisier: The Father of Modern Chemistry" (1936); "Newton and Chemistry" (1943) and "Antoine Lavoisier: Scientist, Economist and Social Reformer" (1953). He was awarded the Legion d Honneur from the French government in 1957 in recognition of his work on Lavoisier, particularly his catalogue of Lavoisier's laboratory equipment then in the possession of the Comtess de Chazelles, and at the time of his death he was in the middle of preparing another monograph on Lavoisier's notebooks. He also hoped to publish further on Black's lectures and had collected much of the necessary research material.In 1936 he co-founded the journal Annals of Science, which he edited until his death. His awards and accolades included the Ramsay Memorial Medal, Dexter Medal (1963) and election to the Royal Society of Antiquaries (1962), liveryman of the Society of Apothecaries (1963), member of the Royal Institute of Chemistry (1956), Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1958) and of the Royal Society of Arts (1958).McKie married Mary Smith in 1922; they had met whilst he was recovering from his injuries at the Royal Herbert Military Hospital, Woolwich, where she was serving as a VAD nurse. They had one son, Duncan McKie, who was a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. Douglas McKie died in 1967 after a period of illness.