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Henry Bradford Nason (born in Foxborough, Massachusetts, 22 June 1831; died in Troy, New York, 18 January 1895) was a United States chemist.
Henry Bradford Nason | |
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Henry Bradford Nason (born in Foxborough, Massachusetts, 22 June 1831; died in Troy, New York, 18 January 1895) was a United States chemist.
His father, Elias Nason (born at Walpole, Massachusetts, in 1768; died at Easthampton, Massachusetts, in 1853), was a manufacturer of straw and cotton goods, a merchant, and served his town, Foxborough, as justice of the peace and as representative in the Massachusetts General Court. The family moved to North Bridgewater (now Brockton) when Henry Bradford was 10.
Having attended school for a short time at Newburyport, Massachusetts, Henry Bradford entered the Adelphian Academy at North Bridgewater in 1843, where his attention was drawn to the study of natural science, and he began to make collections of the local minerals. He entered Williston Seminary in December 1847, where his taste for natural science grew; he also became interested in chemistry, and enriched his collections of plants and minerals.
Nason pursued his studies further at Amherst College. There, he visited the interesting geological points in the Connecticut River Valley, and, under the guidance of Professor Shepard, he spent most of his vacations in the mineralogically rich regions of western Massachusetts and Connecticut, making many of his expeditions on foot or on horseback. He studied analytical chemistry under Professor Clark, and assisted him in the preparations for his lectures. He graduated from Amherst in 1855.
Nason then studied chemistry at the University of Göttingen, Germany, where in 1857 he received the degree of Ph.D. for his original investigations on the formation of ethers. At Göttingen he also became a member of the Burschenschaft Hannovera (fraternity). [1] He afterward spent some time with Robert Bunsen at the University of Heidelberg, and with Karl Friedrich Plattner at the Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg. He enriched his collections with many specimens of minerals and of art.
On his return to the United States in 1858, Nason was appointed professor of natural history at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York, and in the same year he became professor of chemistry and natural sciences in Beloit College, holding both of these appointments until 1866. He then became professor of chemistry and natural science at RPI.
In 1860, he made a second visit to Europe, and made a tour of geological study in the southern United States. In the next year, he traveled through Ireland, Scotland, the Netherlands, Belgium, and a part of Germany, and spent a semester in Göttingen in the study of geology and mineralogy, under Waltershausen. He then visited and studied the volcanic regions of Italy, ascended Mount Vesuvius, explored the regions of the solfatara, climbed Mount Etna, examined the glaciers of Switzerland and the configuration of the Alpine regions; and, in France, inspected the natural curiosities of the Puy-de-Dôme.
In 1872 and 1875 he made three visits to California, in the course of which he traveled in Nevada and Idaho, and the mining regions of Colorado and Utah, and included in his third trip the Yosemite Valley. He spent the summer of 1877 in Finland and Russia. He was appointed juror by U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes for the Paris Exposition of 1878, and was assigned the department of mineralogy and metallurgy.
From 1880 to 1890, [2] he was an advising chemist for the Standard Oil Company. There he worked on the refining of petroleum, methods of testing, analysis of the composition of crude oils, and the abatement of nuisances arising from smoke, odors, and other products of refineries. That year Nason received the degree of M.D. from Union College, and the degree of LL.D. from Beloit College. In 1881 the New York State Board of Health selected him to be inspector of petroleum oils, and appointed him as commissioner to London to consider methods of dealing with petroleum nuisances.
Another visit to northern Europe, in the summer of 1884, embraced the fjords and glaciers of Norway, and was extended to the North Cape. In 1887, Nason was appointed director of Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York.
Nason was a member of the chemical societies of Berlin and New York, and in 1878 he was made a fellow of the London Chemical Society. He was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Society of Chemical Industry; a member of the American Chemical Society, the New York Academy of Sciences, the American Institute of Mining Engineers, and the Troy Scientific Association; an honorary member of the Albany Institute; and a member of the Norwegian Trekking Association.
From 1872 to 1886, he was secretary of the General Alumni Association of RPI. As such, his books of 1875 and 1887 were prepared. [2] Nason hall, an undergraduate residence hall at RPI, is named in his honor. After his death in 1895, he was buried in Oakwood Cemetery were a plaque on his gravestone reads: "Co-founder of GSA and mentor of eminent GSA president Thomas C. Chamberlin, and inspirer of Roebling in mineralogy."
His cousin Elias Nason was a Massachusetts clergyman and author.
Amos Eaton was an American botanist, geologist, and educator who is considered the founder of the modern scientific prospectus in education, which was a radical departure from the American liberal arts tradition of classics, religious classes, lecture, and recitation. Eaton co-founded the Rensselaer School in 1824 with Stephen van Rensselaer III "in the application of science to the common purposes of life". His books in the eighteenth century were among the first published for which a systematic treatment of the United States was attempted, and in a language that all could read. His teaching laboratory for botany in the 1820s was the first of its kind in the country. Eaton's popular lectures and writings inspired numerous thinkers, in particular women, whom he encouraged to attend his public talks on experimental philosophy. Emma Willard would found the Troy Female Seminary, and Mary Mason Lyon, the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Eaton held the rank of senior professor at Rensselaer until his death in 1842.
Ebenezer Emmons, was a pioneering American geologist whose work includes the naming of the Adirondack Mountains in New York as well as a first ascent of Mount Marcy.
Eben Norton Horsford was a United States scientist who taught agricultural chemistry in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard from 1847 to 1863. Later he was known for his reformulation of baking powder, his interest in Viking settlements in North America, and the monuments he built to Leif Erikson.
Frank Wigglesworth Clarke of Boston, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C. was an American scientist and chemist. Sometimes known as the "Father of Geochemistry," Clarke is credited with determining the composition of the Earth's crust. He was a founder of The American Chemical Society and served as its President, 1901.
Martin Ingham Townsend was an American lawyer and politician from New York.
The Winslow Chemical Laboratory was a laboratory of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute campus in Troy, New York, United States, which finished construction in 1866. It is named in honor of the 5th President of RPI, John F. Winslow, who donated half of the construction cost. The building is brick with stone trimmings and was originally constructed with butternut, chestnut and black walnut. The whole building was fitted for complete courses in general and analytical chemistry. The design and construction was overseen by Professor Henry B. Nason, head of the department of chemistry at the Institute. The lower story contained the metallurgical laboratory and second story contained the chemical laboratory, store rooms and work rooms. The laboratory could accommodate about 40 students. The third story contained a lecture room, a private study, the library and a recitation room. The library of chemical books was established by a donation of several sets of journals and a gift of three hundred dollars from John F. Winslow.
West Hall is a building on the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute campus in Troy, New York, United States. It is currently home to the Arts Department at RPI. It was previously a hospital, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as Old Troy Hospital.
Charles Anthony Goessmann, known in his native German as Karl Anton Gößmann, was a Massachusetts agricultural and food chemist.
Karl Johann Kiessling was a German physicist, mathematician, and botanist born in Culm; today Chełmno, Poland.
James Curtis Booth was a United States chemist who was the melter and refiner at the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia for many years.
Berend Wilhelm Feddersen was a German physicist.
The history of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) spans nearly two hundred years beginning with its founding in 1824. RPI is the oldest continuously operating technological university in both the English-speaking world and the Americas. The Institute was the first to grant a civil engineering degree in the United States, in 1835. More recently, RPI also offered the first environmental engineering degree in the United States in 1961, and possibly the first ever undergraduate degree in video game design, in 2007.
Robert J. Linhardt is the Ann and John Broadbent, Jr. '59 Senior Constellation Professor Biocatalysis & Metabolic Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
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Frank Lewis Nason was an American mining engineer, teacher, and writer.
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Henry How was a British-Canadian chemist, geologist and mineralogist.
Edward Bruce Watson is an American geochemist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.
Burschenschaft Hannovera is the oldest Burschenschaft, a traditional liberal German Student fraternity or student corporation (Studentenverbindung), incorporated in Göttingen in May of the revolutionary year 1848 at the Georg August University of Göttingen by students, many in a circle of friends of graduates of the lyceum in Hanover who were studying in Göttingen. Hannovera was chosen for name because the founders where citizens of the Kingdom of Hanover. Hannovera is a lifelong bond (Lebensbund), which brings together students and alumni of Göttingen University, and the only one of the classic german fraternities ever to include a woman: the Swedish Nightingale Jenny Lind.
