Author: Heard, Edward
Biography:
HEARD, Edward (c. 1778-1858: ancestry.com)
Heard published only one book, an anomaly in his career as an inventor and “practical chemist,” but it does include a political satire with the title “The State Alchemists, an Allegorical Tale,” so perhaps it is not altogether anomalous. He may have been the son of Bella and Richard Heard baptised in Rotherham, Yorks., on 4 Apr. 1778: in the censuses of 1841 and 1851 he gave his birth year as 1777 and 1778 respectively. He married Charlotte Amick (1782-1848) on 21 June 1800 at Teddington, Middlesex, and the couple settled initially in Brighton. They had at least six children, one of whom died in infancy. Between 1818 and 1854 he was granted a succession of patents in various fields: a portable gas lamp, a process for manufacturing glass, a “composition” that made sea-water safe for laundry, improvements in oxidizing lead, a proposal to feed silkworms on lettuce instead of mulberry leaves. In Brighton he built a factory in 1819 to manufacture candles from stearine but he suffered from ill health and was obliged to close down. Having moved to London, he tried again to manufacture candles using margarine, but was forced into bankruptcy. In 1838 his address was Bateman’s Buildings in central London but by the time of the 1841 census the family was living in Lambeth—Heard, his wife, two daughters, and a granddaughter. After the death of his wife in Lambeth in 1848, Heard married again, on 17 Jul. 1849 at Kennington Cross. His second wife was Charlotte Condé (b 1821), who may have been his mistress for some years, since the 1851 census records their household at Newington as including four children born between 1844 and 1851. Heard at that time gave his occupation as “practical chemist out of employment.” He died at Lambeth in 1858. (ancestry.com 4 Apr. 2022; findmypast.com 4 Apr. 2022; East Sussex and Brighton and Hove Record Office AMS6468/3; English Patents of Inventions 1853 No. 1974; Salisbury and Winchester Journal 5 Feb. 1821; Nottingham Review and General Advertiser 17 Sept. 1838)