William Hyde Wollaston was born on 6 August 1766, the son of a vicar. He was educated at a private school in Lewisham and at Charterhouse School, before entering Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in 1782. He primarily studied medicine, but also studied astronomy with John Brinkley, later astronomer royal for Ireland; chemistry with his elder brother Francis John Hyde Wollaston, lecturer in mathematics, and botany.

Wollaston left Cambridge in 1789 and initially practised medicine. However, he abandoned medicine in 1801 and set himself in a private laboratory in London. In 1800 he had entered into a business partnership with the chemist Smithson Tennant, whom he had met at Cambridge and through whose friendship Wollaston became interested in platinum. Wollason and Tennant’s partnership lasted until about 1809 and sought to make platinum malleable to enable it to be put to practical use. Their venture was a success and brought Wollaston both scientific fame and wealth. In the course of their research Wollaston and Tennant discovered four new elements: osmium and iridium were attributed to Tennant and palladium and rhodium to Wollaston.

Today, Wollaston is largely remembered for having prepared platinum in a malleable form, however he made a number of other contributions to science, ranging over a wide field. In all he wrote nearly sixty papers, and was known as ‘the pope’ by his contemporaries. Outside the metallurgy of platinum and related metals, some of Wollaston's most important work was in crystallography, where the diagnostic significance of the angles between the faces of crystals had been demonstrated by R.-E. Haüy. The crude contact goniometers then in use gave a rather rough measure of these angles. Wollaston invented a much more accurate optical goniometer, in which the angles were measured by the reflection of a beam of light; this improved accuracy fivefold. Wollaston also invented a method of measuring the refractive index of crystals by total internal reflection.

In 1802 Wollaston observed in the solar spectrum the dark lines later known as Fraunhofer lines. Four years later he patented a camera lucida, containing a quadrilateral glass prism, which, by two internal reflections, projected upward an image of an object illuminated horizontally. This could be used for drawing and also for sketching images created by a microscope. He also improved the performance of the compound microscope by introducing the objective planoconvex lenses, relatively easy to grind, in place of the concavoconvex ones then commonly used. A diaphragm was placed between the lenses. This ‘Wollaston doublet’ reduced chromatic and spherical aberration.

Although Wollaston's interest was increasingly in the physical sciences, he retained his interest in physiology. He discovered the chemical composition of urinary and gouty calculi; described, in his Croonian lecture to the Royal Society in 1809, the vibratory nature of muscular action; and identified the upper limit of frequencies detectable by the human ear, again in 1809.

Wollaston was a prominent member of the scientific establishment in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1793 and a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1795. The Royal Society award him its most prestigious award, the Copley medal, in 1802, and he also served as vice-president of the Royal Society a number of times. He was also elected a foreign associate of the French Academy of Sciences in 1823.

Wollaston died in London on 22 December 1828 at his home in London. Earlier that month he had made substantial donations to the Royal, Geological, and Astronomical societies, which were collectively representative of his scientific interests. The Geological Society named its highest award, the Wollaston medal, after him. The Wollaston medal was first awarded in 1831.