James Burgess Readman

James Burgess Readman was a Scottish chemist, born around 1850 in Glasgow and died in April 1927 at Bradford-on-Avon, who invented an electric furnace process for making phosphorus. He devised the furnace in 1888 and patented it in 1889, and the method decomposes a mixture of phosphoric acid or acid phosphates with carbon by the heat of an electric arc embedded in the mass. The process was worked as the Readman-Parker process at a plant in Wolverhampton. He was the son of a Glasgow bank manager, was educated at Glasgow Academy, and studied science at the University of Edinburgh, graduating with a BSc and MD in 1888. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1883. In his later career he worked as an analytical and consulting chemist in Glasgow and Leith, ran the Forth and Clyde Chemical Works at Kirkintilloch in the late 1890s, and published An Account of the Manufacture of Phosphorus in 1890.