Walter Weldon

Walter Weldon (31 October 1832 – 20 September 1885) was an English chemist, journalist, and fashion publisher.

Weldon was brother to Ernest J. Weldon, founder of Weldon & Wilkinson Ltd. Walter's second son was Walter Frank Raphael Weldon, an English evolutionary zoologist and biometrician.

In 1854 he began work as a journalist in London with The Dial (which was afterwards incorporated in The Morning Star), and in 1860 he started a monthly magazine, Weldon's Register of Facts and Occurrences relating to Literature, the Sciences and the Arts, which was later discontinued.

His publications in the late 1800s were through Weldon & Company, a pattern company who produced hundreds of patterns and projects for numerous types of Victorian needlework. Around 1888, the company began to publish a series of books entitled Weldon’s Practical Needlework, each volume consisting of the various newsletters (one year of publications) bound together with a cloth cover and costing 2 shilling/6 pence.

Weldon's Ladies' Journal (1875–1954) supplied dressmaking patterns, and was a blueprint for subsequent 'home weeklies'. Walter Weldon also founded Weldon's Fashion Journal, Weldon's Patterns, and Weldon's Household Encyclopaedia.

Weldon was interested in parapsychology and was a spiritualist, he was a member of the Society for Psychical Research.

Weldon was a successful chemist and developed the Weldon process to produce chlorine by boiling hydrochloric acid with manganese dioxide. MnO₂ was expensive, and Weldon developed a process for its recycling by treating the manganese chloride produced with milk of lime and blowing air through the mixture to form a precipitate known as Weldon mud which was used to generate more chlorine.

Manganese dioxide reacts with hydrochloric acid to chlorine and Manganse chloride:

${\displaystyle \mathrm {MnO_{2}+4\ HCl\longrightarrow MnCl_{2}+Cl_{2}+2\ H_{2}O} }$