Silliman Snr 2
Silliman, Benjamin (see main node)
Benjamin Silliman (August 8, 1779 – November 24, 1864) was an early American chemist and science educator.[1] He was one of the first American professors of science, at Yale College, the first person to use the process of fractional distillation in America, and a founder of the American Journal of Science, the oldest continuously published scientific journal in the United States.[2]
Early life[]
Silliman as he appears at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.
Silliman c. 1860
Silliman was born in a tavern in North Stratford, now Trumbull, Connecticut, to Mary (Fish) Silliman (widow of John Noyes) and General Gold Selleck Silliman. He was born in August 1779, several months after British forces took his father prisoner and his mother had fled their home in Fairfield, Connecticut, to escape 2,000 British troops who burned Fairfield center to the ground.
Silliman was educated at Yale, receiving a B.A. degree in 1796 and a M.A. in 1799. He studied law with Simeon Baldwin from 1798 to 1799 and became a tutor at Yale from 1799 to 1802. He was admitted to the bar in 1802. That same year he was hired by Yale President Timothy Dwight IV as a professor of chemistry and natural history. Silliman, who had never studied chemistry,[3]: 6 prepared for the job by studying chemistry with Professor James Woodhouse at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. In 1804, he delivered his first lectures in chemistry, which were also the first science lectures ever given at Yale.[4] In 1805, he traveled to University of Edinburgh for further study.
Benjamin Silliman
Career[]
Title page, inaugural edition of the American Journal of Science, founded by Benjamin Silliman, 1818
Returning to New Haven, he studied its geology. His chemical analysis of a meteorite that fell in 1807 near Weston, Connecticut, was the first published scientific account of an American meteorite. He lectured publicly at New Haven in 1808 and came to discover many of the constituent elements of many minerals. Some time around 1818, Ephraim Lane took some samples of rocks he found at an area called Saganawamps, now a part of the Old Mine Park Archeological Site in Trumbull, Connecticut, to Silliman for identification. Silliman reported in his new American Journal of Science, a publication covering all the natural sciences but with an emphasis on geology, that he had identified tungsten, tellurium, topaz and fluorite in the rocks.[5] He played a major role in the discoveries of the first fossil fishes found in the United States.[6] In 1837, the first (and at the time only) prismatic barite ore of tungsten in the United States was discovered at the mine. The mineral sillimanite was named after Silliman in 1850. Upon the founding of the Medical School, he also taught there as one of the founding faculty members.
In 1833 he discussed the relationship of Flood geology to the Genesis account,[7] and also wrote about this topic in 1840.[8]
Silliman was an early supporter of coeducation in the Ivy League. Although Yale wouldn't admit women as students until over 100 years later, he allowed young women into his lecture classes. His efforts convinced Frederick Barnard, later President of Columbia College, that women ought to be admitted as students. "The elder Silliman, during the entire period of his distinguished career as a Professor of Chemistry, Geology and Mineralogy in Yale College, was accustomed every year to admit to his lecture-courses classes of young women from the schools of New Haven. In that institution the undersigned had an opportunity to observe, as a student, the effect of the practice, similar to that which he afterward created for himself in Alabama, as a teacher. The results in both instances, so far as they went, were good; and they went far enough to make it evident that if the presence of young women in college, instead of being occasional, should be constant, they would be better."[9]
American historian David McCullough mentions in his book about early 19th century Americans in Paris that in 1825 Professor Benjamin Silliman while on a tour of Europe conferring with other scientists encountered his former Yale science student Samuel F. B. Morse in the Louvre. McCullough also relates that Silliman would later become president of the college.[10]
As professor emeritus, he delivered lectures at Yale on geology until 1855; Benjamin Silliman Sr had been the first person to use the process of fractional distillation, and, in 1854, Benjamin Silliman Jr became the first person to fractionate petroleum by distillation.[11]
In 1864, Silliman noted oil seeps in the Ojai, California area. In 1866, this led to the start of oil exploration and development in the Ojai Basin.[12]
Like his son-in-law James Dana, Silliman was a Christian.[13] In an address delivered before the Association of American Geologists he spoke in favor of old-earth creationism, stating:
It is already admitted by multitudes, that the chronology of the Scriptures is, in strictness, applied only to the history of our race, the sole moral beings whom God has placed in this World; while all that precedes man in the creation, is limited, in duration backwards, only by that beginning, whose date is known to no being but the infinite Creator, and which certainly precedes, by many ages, the creation of man.
— Silliman, (1842)[14]
In the same line of thought, he posed arguments against atheism and materialism.[15]
1807 meteor[]
Main article: Weston meteorite
At 6:30 in the morning of December 14, 1807, a blazing fireball about two-thirds the apparent size of the moon in the sky, was seen traveling southwards by early risers in Vermont and Massachusetts. Three loud explosions were heard over the town of Weston in Fairfield County, Connecticut. Stone fragments fell in at least 6 places. The largest and only unbroken stone of the Weston fall, which weighed 36.5 pounds (16.5 kilograms), was found some days after Silliman and Kingsley had spent several fruitless hours hunting for it. The owner, a Trumbull farmer named Elijah Seeley, was urged to present it to Yale by local people who had met the professors during their investigation, but he insisted on putting it up for sale. It was purchased by Colonel George Gibbs for his large and famous collection of minerals; when the collection became the property of Yale in 1825, Silliman finally acquired this stone; the only specimen of the Weston meteorite that remains in the Yale Peabody Museum collection today.[16][17]
Personal life[]
Portrait of Harriett Trumbull from a crayon sketch by her uncle John Trumbull, Yale University Art Gallery
Silliman with his extended family.
His first marriage was on September 17, 1809, to Harriet Trumbull,[a] daughter of Connecticut governor Jonathan Trumbull, Jr., who was the son of Governor Jonathan Trumbull, Sr. of Connecticut, a hero of the American Revolution. Silliman and his wife had four children: one daughter married Professor Oliver P. Hubbard, another married Professor James Dwight Dana (Silliman's doctoral student until 1833 and assistant from 1836 to 1837);[3]: 7 and youngest daughter Julia married Edward Whiting Gilman, brother of Yale graduate and educator Daniel Coit Gilman. His son Benjamin Silliman Jr., also a professor of chemistry at Yale, wrote a report that convinced investors to back George Bissell's seminal search for oil. His second marriage was in 1851 to Mrs. Sarah Isabella (McClellan) Webb, daughter of John McClellan. Silliman died at New Haven and is buried in Grove Street Cemetery.
Photo of the Benjamin Silliman family with portrait of his deceased wife Harriet Trumbull on wall.
Legacy[]
Silliman deemed slavery an "enormous evil". He favored colonization of free African Americans in Liberia, serving as a board member of the Connecticut Colonization Society between 1828 and 1835. He was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1813,[20] and an Associate Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1815.[21] Silliman founded and edited the American Journal of Science, and was appointed one of the corporate members of the National Academy of Sciences by the United States Congress. He was also a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
A statue of Silliman in front of Yale's Sterling Chemistry Laboratory
Things named for him[]
Silliman College, one of Yale's residential colleges, is named for him, as is the mineral Sillimanite.
In Sequoia National Park, Mount Silliman is named for him, as is Silliman Pass, a creek and two lakes below the summit of Mount Silliman.
The standard author abbreviation Silliman is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.[22]
See also[]
Notes[]
- ^ Trumbull and her sister Maria Trumbull spent the winter of 1800 and spring of 1801 in New York City where they came out to New York society.[18] The teenaged girls stayed at the home of Lady Kitty Duer. Friends of their parents made plans for the girls' lessons and social activities.[19] They had music, dancing, and drawing lessons. Their letters to their parents provided insight into their lives of lessons, parties, plays, and more. The letters were published in the book A season in New York, 1801.[18] The book provides insight into the inner thoughts of 19th-century girls as they experienced life in a big city.[19]
References
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Knowledge Web Content (see main node)
ACHIEVEMENT(S): Made science popular in US
DATE/PLACE OF BIRTH: 8thAugust 1779, North Stratford (now Trumbull), CT.
DATE/PLACE/AGE AT DEATH: 24thNovember 1864 in New Haven, CT. Aged 85.
DISCIPLINE: Geologist.
FIELD: Education.
LANGUAGE: English.
PARENTS: Gold Selleck Silliman, a general in the Continental Army, and Mary Fish.
SIBLINGS: Selleck
SPOUSE: Harriet Trumbull, married 1809, died 1850. Sarah Isabella Maclean Webb, married 1851.
CHILDREN: Maria, Faith, Benjamin (also a scientist), Harriet, and Julia.
EDUCATION: Private tutor: Rev. Andrew Eliot; Yale University.
MAJOR WORK: Establishment of the American Journal of Science
LIFE AND TIMES:
At the time Silliman passed his law examinations at Yale, the college decided to introduce natural science to the curriculum and in September 1802 asked Silliman to be the first professor. Silliman was sent to Philadelphia to increase his knowledge of the subject, ready for the professorship. In Philadelphia he studied chemistry, botany, anatomy and surgery under Dr James Woodhouse and, for a short time, under Rush*. In 1804, Silliman gave the first course of lectures in chemistry at Yale. In 1806 he established some of the first soda fountains in the US, leading to the pop-ularization (sorry) of fizzy soft drinks. Silliman was then sent to Europe to buy books and equipment.
In Britain and he met some of the foremost intellects of the day, including Dalton*, Davy*, Wollaston*, William Wilberforce* and West*. He talked at length with Watt* about mineralogy, chemistry, history, antiquities and the fine arts and he was able to attend one of the discussion groups held by Banks*. In Edinburgh he visited the offices of the "Edinburgh Review", and met Brewster*, later the editor of "Brewster’s Edinburgh Journal of Science", who was a great help to Silliman when he later began his own journal. He wrote an account of his travels in Europe and the two voyages across the Atlantic. It was widely read and provided Americans with their first up-to-date ideas about Europe.
Silliman’s courses at Yale were popular, and a number of his students became leading scientists in their own right, among them his son Benjamin Silliman junior* and Samuel Morse*. Silliman also took a leading role in establishing graduate and professional training in the sciences at Yale. When the Weston Meteor fell in December of 1807, Silliman and Professor James Kingsley carried out an extensive investigation into the circumstances and their report was printed in the "Connecticut Herald". Following this, Silliman chemically analysed the debris of the meteor and wrote an expanded paper, which was presented to the American Philosophical Society, the Philosophical Society of London and the Academy of Sciences in Paris. This was the first time that a scientific paper had created so much interest among the American public.
In 1808, he began a series of lectures, which were innovative because they were open to the general public of New Haven and New York. His reputation as a geologist was growing and in May 1810 he was asked to perform his first commercial survey for a lead mine at Southampton, MA. Silliman also supported the idea of establishing a medical school at Yale and when the school was founded in 1813, he handled most of the detail, securing the charter from the state legislature and gaining the co-operation of local doctors.
In 1818, he founded "The American Journal of Science". Before that time, scientific papers were only published abroad, or by learned societies. Now, publication of original papers, notices and reviews from all over the world meant that almost any current scientific topic could be found somewhere in "The American Journal of Science". The journal became internationally recognised as one of the great scientific publications of the day and Silliman’s vast correspondence through the journal made him a fount of knowledge on the scientific world. In 1840, he was made the first president of the Association of American Geologists. By 1845, Silliman was ready to retire from Yale, but at the request of the college he stayed on until 1853, when he retired as professor emeritus.
In 1851, he travelled to Europe again on an extensive tour, visiting the Great Exhibition in England and attending meetings of scientific societies in London, before going on to France, Italy, Sicily, Switzerland, Germany and Belgium. Afterwards he wrote a two-volume account of his journey, "A Visit to Europe, 1851".
In 1863, he was made a charter member of the National Academy of Science and he continued to occupy himself with editorial work and correspondence. A highlight in these later years was being able to discuss the biography of George Washington with its author, Washington Irving*. Although retired from Yale, he continued to promote the interests of the College and, through his efforts, the financier George Peabody was persuaded to donate $100,000 to the scientific school.
On 4thNovember 1864, the day after attending a meeting of the Sanitary Commission, to hear reports on work being done to help the sick and wounded soldiers of the Civil War, Silliman became ill and developed pneumonia from which he died.
ASSESSMENT: A promoter and interpreter of science, Silliman played an important role in establishing science as an academic subject in America.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: He met chemist Joseph Priestley* during his visit to Yale.
Knew Jedidiah Morse*, Turnbull* Maclure* and Hawthorne*
His son-in-law as Dana*
ONELINER: Benjamin Silliman Snr, first chemistry prof at Yale
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Brown, Chandos Michael,Benjamin Silliman, A Life in the Young Republic, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1989.