Prafulla Chandra Ray

Starting from his sixtieth anniversary, his salary was granted to the ‘Calcutta University’ which was utilised to expand the ‘Department of Chemistry’ and promote research at the ‘University College of Science’.

Several awards such as the ‘Nagarjuna Prize’ for chemistry and ‘Ashutosh Mukherjee Award’ for biology were established by this eminent scientist.

Born to a rich land owner Harish Chandra Ray in Raruli-Katipara village, Bangladesh, on August 2, 1861, Prafulla Chandra Ray, was the younger of two brothers.

He was enrolled at a local school founded by his well-to-do family, for his early education till 1870, when they moved to Calcutta.

In Calcutta, the two brothers enrolled at one of the oldest schools of the city, the ‘Hare School’.

It was in 1874, that young Prafulla contracted dysentery and was forced to discontinue his studies. For the next two years that he spent in Raruli-Katipara, he harboured a love for reading and later learnt the languages Latin and French.

In 1879 after Ray completed his matriculation from the ‘Albert School’, he pursued higher education from the ‘Vidyasagar College’. As the institution had no facility for teaching science subjects, he took lessons in physics and chemistry at the ‘Presidency College’.

He continued further research on his thesis, for a year, which dealt with the isomorphous mixtures and then returned to Calcutta in 1888. The following year he was appointed to a temporary position at the ‘Presidency College’ in the city.

As India was then a British colony, the natives were kept aloof from the highly ranked positions despite their qualifications and merit. Though he tried to attract the attention of the authorities but his pleas fell on deaf ears.

In 1896, he published the results of his research on nitrites of mercury; he had developed the stable compound mercurous nitrite and it implored other scientists to study the nitrites of metals and amines.

He founded the ‘Bengal Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals Works Ltd.’ in 1901 with a capital of 700 INR. The company has expanded over the years and currently deals with manufacture of Alum, drugs and pharmaceuticals and household products such as naphthalene, floor and toilet cleaner.

Over the course of next few years he studied many ancient texts on science and the result was the book ‘A History of Hindu Chemistry from the Earliest Times to the Middle of Sixteenth Century’, published in 1902. Continuing his research, he published a second edition, six years later.

Prafulla Chandra ray was best known for his work on nitrites of mercury, which paved way for study of nitrites of other metals and amines. His discovery of a stable compound of mercurous nitrite earned him fame and recognition within the scientific community.