Person

Steel, Thomas (1858 - 1925)

Born
8 September 1858
Glasgow, Lanark, Scotland
Died
17 August 1925
Killara, New South Wales, Australia
Occupation
Chemist and Naturalist

Summary

Thomas Steel worked as laboratory chemist for the Colonial Sugar Refining Co. from 1882, including postings to New Zealand and Fiji. From 1892 he was a chemist at the company's head office in Sydney until he retired in 1918. A keen naturalist from boyhood, he edited the Australian Naturalist 1911-1925. In his research he focussed on Onycophora (velvet worms) and Turbellaria (flatworms), publishing a number of significant papers between 1896 and 1901. Steel was active in local scientific societies, including as a member of council and President of the Linnean Society of New South Wales. Steel donated many artefacts (particularly stone tools) to the Australian Museum, mostly from Australia, New Caledonia and Fiji. His widow made further donations after his death.

Skip to

Details

Chronology

1882
Life event - Migrated to New South Wales
1882 - 1884
Career position - Laboratory chemist, Colonial Sugar Refining Company, Murwillumbah, New South Wales
1885 - 1887
Career position - Laboratory chemist, Colonial Sugar Refining Company, Nauru and Fiji
1892 - 1918
Career position - Chemist, Colonial Sugar Refining Company, Sydney
1897 - 1925
Career position - Member of Council, Linnean Society of New South Wales
1903 - 1904
Career position - President, Field Naturalists' Club (later society), Sydney
1905 - 1907
Career position - President, Linnean Society of New South Wales
1910 - 1911
Career position - Chairman, Sydney Section, Society of Chemical Industry
1918
Career event - Retired

Related Corporate Bodies

Archival resources

Australian Museum

  • Thomas Steel - Records, 1889 - 1926, Series 9; Australian Museum. Details

Mitchell and Dixson Libraries Manuscripts Collection, State Library of New South Wales

  • Baldwin Spencer - Records, 1880 - 1929, ML MSS 29; Mitchell and Dixson Libraries Manuscripts Collection, State Library of New South Wales. Details

The Noel Butlin Archives Centre, ANU Archives Program

  • Thomas Steel - Records, 1882 - 1918; The Noel Butlin Archives Centre, ANU Archives Program. Details

Published resources

Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation Exhibitions

  • Collins, David, Chemistry in 19th Australia - Select Bibliography, An exhibition of the Encyclopedia circa 2005 with assistance from Ailie Smith and Gavan McCarthy., eScholarship Research Centre (original publisher), Melbourne, 2009, https://eoas.info/exhibitions/ciab/ciab_ALL.html. Details

Book Sections

  • Holland, H. G.; Simons, J. R., 'Steel, Thomas (1858-1925), industrial chemist and naturalist' in Australian dictionary of biography, volume 12: 1891 - 1939 Smy-Z, John Ritchie, ed. (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1990), p. 59. http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A120073b.htm. Details

Journal Articles

  • Anon, 'Thomas Steel', Australian Museum magazine, 2 (8) (1925), 276. Details
  • Rae, Ian D., 'All that glitters is not gold', Chemistry in Australia (2022), 41. Details
  • Steel, Thomas, 'On "Red Rain" Dust', Report of the seventh meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, 7 (1898), 334-335, https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/15378300. Details

Resources

See also

  • Carter, H. J., 'Presidential address', Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales, 51 (1927), i-xxix. Details
  • Musgrave, A., Bibliography of Australian entomology, 1775-1930: with biographical notes on authors and collectors (Sydney: Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales, 1932), 380 pp. Details

Gavan McCarthy [P004098] and Helen Cohn

Created: 20 October 1993, Last modified: 6 October 2023

EOAS ID: biogs/P001939b.htm

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
What do we mean by this?

Published by Swinburne University of Technology.
This Edition: 2024 November (Ballambar - Gariwerd calendar - early summer - season of butterflies)
Reference: http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/calendars/gariwerd.shtml#ballambar
For earlier editions see the Internet Archive at: https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.eoas.info

The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation uses the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), a relational data curation and web publication system developed by the eScholarship Research Centre and its predecessors at the University of Melbourne 1999-2020. The OHRM has been maintained by Gavan McCarthy since 2020.

Cite this page: https://www.eoas.info/biogs/P001939b.htm

"... the rengitj, as a visible mark or imprint on the land, is characterised as a place of origin, the repository of all names, as well as a kind of mapped visual expression of the connection between people and places which is to be carried out in the temporal sequence of the journey." Fanca Tamisari (1998) 'Body, Vision and Movement: In the footprints of the ancestors'. Oceania 68(4) p260