Elizabeth Fulhame

Elizabeth Fulhame (fl. 1794) was an early British chemist who invented the concept of catalysis and discovered photoreduction. She was described as 'the first solo woman researcher of modern chemistry'.

Although she only published one text, she describes catalysis as a process at length in her 1794 book An Essay On Combustion with a View to a New Art of Dying and Painting, wherein the Phlogistic and Antiphlogistic Hypotheses are Proved Erroneous. The book relates in painstaking detail her experiments with oxidation-reduction reactions, and the conclusions she draws regarding phlogiston theory, in which she disagrees with both the Phlogistians and Antiphlogistians.

In 1798, the book was translated into German by Augustin Gottfried Ludwig Lentin as Versuche über die Wiederherstellung der Metalle durch Wasserstoffgas. In 1810, it was published in the United States, to much critical acclaim. That same year, Fulhame was made an honorary member of the Philadelphia Chemical Society. Thomas P. Smith applauded her work, stating that "Mrs. Fulhame has now laid such bold claims to chemistry that we can no longer deny the sex the privilege of participating in this science also."