Percival Norton Johnson

Percival Norton Johnson (1792–1866) was the founder of Johnson Matthey, the United Kingdom's largest precious metals business.

Career

Having trained in his father's business as an assayer, Percival Johnson established his own firm in 1817.[1] He specialised in the assaying and refining of precious metals particularly gold imported from Brazil: he perfected a method of extracting the Palladium from the gold therefore improving the gold's colour.[1] He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1846.[1] He went into full partnership with George Matthey, a stockbroker, in 1851.[1] His expertise in refining earned his business the appointment of Assayer to the Bank of England in 1852.[1]

He was also active in silver-mining and in 1854 moved to Stoke Fleming[2] in Devon where he had mining interests.[1] He retired in 1860 and died in 1866.[1]

Family

He married Elizabeth Lydia Smith in 1817: they had no children.[1] He married a second time, to Georgina Elizabeth Ellis, in 1858.[1]

gollark: Overloading things when they work quite differently doesn't actually make stuff *simpler*.
gollark: I don't think it ends up "simpler" as much as "about the same".
gollark: I suppose you can put in the documentation "write(thing, what) - look, you just write everything this way" but people have to know about its behavior with different `thing`s anyway.
gollark: So it doesn't end up simpler.
gollark: Well, yes, but the kernel has to do branching based on the file descriptor type anyway.

References
  1. Percival Norton Johnson at Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
  2. Some Old Devon Churches By J. Stabb London: Simpkin et al (1908-16) Page 221

Further reading
  • Biography of Percival Norton Johnson, published by Johnson Matthey, 1951


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