Edmund Letts was born in Kent and was educated at Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire, King's College, London, and briefly at the Universities of Vienna and Berlin. At the age of twenty he became chief assistant in the Chemistry Department of Edinburgh University. Four years later he was appointed the first Professor of Chemistry at University College, Bristol. In 1879 he became Professor of Chemistry at Queen's College, Belfast, where he remained for thirty-eight years. His main areas of research were: the chemistry of organic compounds of sulphur and phosphorus; the determination of carbon dioxide in air and water (his methods were employed by the first Scott Antarctic expedition); and the pollution of rivers and tidal waters. He published Some Fundamental Problems of Chemistry, Old and New and many papers in journals. He was a prominent member of the Belfast Natural History Society and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the Institute of Chemistry. Upon the foundation of Queen's University, Belfast, he was one of the first members of Senate. He returned to England and was killed in a cycling accident.

Born:	1852
Died:	1918