Frank Sherwood Taylor (November 26 1897 – 5 January 1956) was a Britishhistorian of science,museum curator, andchemist who was director of theScience Museum inLondon,England.^[1]

F. Sherwood Taylor was educated atSherborne School inDorset, southernEngland andLincoln College, Oxford.^[2] He then undertook a PhD atUniversity College, London in the new Department of History and Method of Science.

He spent a period as a schoolmaster and then as a lecturer inchemistry atQueen Mary College, London. He was a founder member of thePhilosophy of Science Group. He was also the founder editor of theAmbix journal, started in 1937, and the journal of theSociety for the History of Alchemy and ChemistryIn 1940, he succeededRobert Gunther as Curator of theMuseum of the History of Science inOxford.^[3]Towards the end of his life, he was director of the Science Museum from 1950 until his death in 1956. During this time, he delivered the 1952Royal Institution Christmas Lectures in London onHow Science has Grown. He was President of theBritish Society for the History of Science from 1951 to 1953.^[4][5]

In an interview conducted byErrol Friedberg,Sydney Brenner said:

I think like most children, I got interested in nature very early. And then by reading a little book calledThe Young Chemist by Sherwood Taylor, I got interested in actually doing chemical experiments. So I started my career as a garage chemist, buying chemicals from the local pharmacist and making things according to the prescriptions then, and going forward to more experiments, just on that basis. I then started — still while I was at school — extracting pigments from petals and just doing really cookbook chemistry, on that basis.^[6]

F. Sherwood Taylor wrote many books on the history ofalchemy andchemistry in particular, and also ofscience in general:^[7][8]

• Inorganic and Theoretical Chemistry (1931);5th edition (1939)
• Organic Chemistry (1933)
• A Short Organic Chemistry (1933)
• The Young Chemist (1934, new edition 1961). Practical Books, Thomas Nelson and Sons, Edinburgh.
• The World of Science (1936);^[9] 1064 pages
• Galileo and the Freedom of Thought (1938)^[10]
• General Science for Schools: Parts 1–3 (1939)
• The March of Mind: A Short History of Science (1939)
• A Short History of Science and Scientific Thought, with readings from the great scientists from theBabylonians toEinstein (1940)
• The Century of Science (1941)
• The Conquest of Bacteria, fromSalvarsan toSulphapyridine (1942)
• Science, Past and Present (1945)^[11]
• The Fourfold Vision: a study of the relations of science and religion (1946)^[12]
• Two Ways of Life - Christian and Materialist (1947)
• A Century of British Chemistry (Science in Britain) (1947)
• Man's Conquest of Nature (1948)
• Concerning Science (1949)
• The Alchemists, Founders of Modern Chemistry (1949)^[13]
• British Inventions (1950)
• Man and Matter - Essays Scientific & Christian (1951)
• The Alchemists (1952)
• Power Today and Tomorrow (1954)
• An Illustrated History of Science (1955)
• A History of Industrial Chemistry (Technology and Society) (1957)
• An Introduction To Alchemy

• 1897 births
• 1956 deaths
• Schoolteachers from London
• People educated at Sherborne School
• Alumni of Lincoln College, Oxford
• Alumni of University College London
• English curators
• British historians of science
• British academic journal editors
• Academics of Queen Mary University of London
• Academics of the University of Oxford
• Directors of museums in the United Kingdom
• Directors of the Science Museum, London
• 20th-century English historians
• 20th-century English chemists

• CS1 maint: postscript
• Use dmy dates from November 2015
• Use British English from November 2015
• All Wikipedia articles written in British English