Джон Джордж Чилдрен: Химик, минералог и зоолог

British chemist, mineralogist and zoologist

John George Children FRS FRSE FLS PRES (18 May 1777 – 1 January 1852 in Halstead, Kent) was a British chemist, mineralogist and zoologist. He invented a method to extract silver from ore without the need for mercury. He was a friend of Sir Humphry Davy, who helped him secure a controversial appointment to a post in the British Museum. Children was also the founding president of the Royal Entomological Society.

John George was born on 18 May 1777 at Ferox Hall, Tonbridge, Kent. His father, George Children FRS (1742–1818), a banker, belonged to a family that lived at the home, near Nether Street in Hildenborough; his mother, Susanna, who was the daughter of Rev. Thomas Marshall Jordan of West Farleigh, died six days after he was born. Children studied at Tonbridge School, Eton College and later at Queens' College, Cambridge. In 1798, he married Hester Anna Holwell, granddaughter of John Zephaniah Holwell. After her unexpected passing, in 1800, he began to travel with more regularity. He went on to wed another woman, Caroline Wise (daughter of George Furlong Wise of Woolston), in 1809; she also died the following year. In 1819, he married a Mrs. Towers, the two remaining together until her death, twenty years later, in 1839. After the division of the Department into three sections in 1837 he became keeper of the Department of Zoology, retiring in 1840 and succeeded by his assistant John Edward Gray. After his retirement he took an interest in astronomy. Children was made a fellow of the Royal Society in 1807, and served as the society's secretary in 1826, and from 1830 to 1837. In 1833, he was founding president of what became the Royal Entomological Society of London. His name is commemorated in the names of several species, most described by Gray or his brother, including the Australian Children's python, Antaresia childreni, the Australian stick insect Tropidoderus childrenii, the North American lady beetle Exochomus childreni as well as a mineral called childrenite. John James Audubon named a warbler after him, but the specimen turned out to be a juvenile yellow warbler.

His only daughter (from his first wife Hester Anna) was Anna Atkins, a botanist, who is best known for her book of cyanotype photograms of algae, the first book of exclusively photographic images ever made. She wrote a memoir on the life of her father which included several unpublished poems.