P. G. Owston

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Philip George Owston (January 1921 – September 2001) was a British chemist and crystallographer. The Owston Islands in Antarctica are named after him. He was born in Saltburn-by-the-Sea, Yorkshire, England, in January 1921 to Edward Owston and Margaret Smith, and he died in Watford, Hertfordshire, England, in September 2001.

Owston’s crystallography work helped determine the structure of Zeise’s salt, K[PtCl3(η2-C2H4)]·H2O, one of the first organometallic compounds discovered in 1831. The platinum–ethylene bond was not understood until the Dewar–Chatt–Duncanson model in the 1950s. The space-filling model based on Owston’s crystal structure shows direct Pt–C bonds between the platinum center and the two carbon atoms of the ethylene ligand.

In 1964 Owston wrote a New Scientist article about the use of electron spin resonance spectroscopy in chemistry.