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Dan Eley

British chemist (1914-2015)

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 31, 2026
Entity authorityQ18601970
Source-derived summary

Daniel Douglas Eley (1 October 1914 – 3 September 2015) was a British chemist and Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Nottingham. He is known for the Eley–Rideal mechanism in surface chemistry.

Biography

Eley obtained a BSc in Chemistry from the University of Manchester in 1934, and an MSc in 1935. He studied for a PhD with Michael Polanyi which he obtained in 1937, but then moved to St John's College, Cambridge where he undertook a second PhD with Eric Rideal which he obtained in 1940.

In 1945 he was appointed to a Lectureship in Colloid Science at the University of Bristol and was promoted to a Readership in Biophysical Chemistry in 1951. In 1954 he was appointed to be the first Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Nottingham. In 1961 he was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), and in 1964 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Academic career

Eley was instrumental in the development of the School of Chemistry at the University of Nottingham (formerly the Department of Chemistry). Together with Alan Johnson and Cliff Addison (Professors of Organic and Inorganic Chemistry, respectively) he oversaw the construction of a new Chemistry building in 1960.

Eley worked in a variety of areas including heterogeneous catalysis, organic semiconductors, molecular sieves, photochemistry and radiation chemistry, X-ray crystallography, equilibria in solution, colloids and interfaces and magnetic properties of materials.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Dan Eley” as british chemist (1914-2015). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1914, 2015, 1934, 1935—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1914-10-01. The account is most persuasive where Eley, British and chemist can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as british chemist (1914-2015). Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q18601970. VIAF identifies the subject as 85189399. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1914, 2015, 1934 and 1935.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Dan Eley” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.