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Ira Remsen

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Ira Remsen
Portrait painting, 1906
Born(1846-02-10)February 10, 1846
New York City, New York, U.S.
DiedMarch 4, 1927(1927-03-04) (aged 81)
Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, U.S.
NationalityAmerican
Alma materColumbia University
University of Göttingen
Known forDiscovery of saccharin
Founder, American Chemical Journal
SpouseElisabeth Hilleard Mallory
AwardsPriestley Medal (1923)
Willard Gibbs Award (1914)
Scientific career
FieldsChemistry
InstitutionsUniversity of Tübingen
Williams College
Johns Hopkins University
Doctoral advisorWilhelm Rudolph Fittig
Doctoral studentsWilliam Henry Emerson
Charles Herty
William A. Noyes
Kotaro Shimomura
Ebenezer Emmet Reid
Signature

Ira Remsen (February 10, 1846 – March 4, 1927) was an American chemist who introduced organic chemistry research and education in the United States along the lines of German universities where he received his early training. He was the first professor of chemistry and the second president of Johns Hopkins University. He founded the American Chemical Journal, which he edited from 1879 to 1914. The discovery of Saccharine was made in his laboratory by Constantine Fahlberg who worked in collaboration with Remsen but patented the synthesis on his own, earning the ire of Remsen.[1][2][3]

Early life

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Shortly after returning from Germany, c. 1897
Portrait of Dr. Ira Remsen, painted by Ira Mallory Remsen in 1926.

Ira Remsen was born in New York City on February 10, 1846. He was the son of James Vanderbelt Remsen (1818–1892) and Rosanna née Secor (1823–1856) who came from family of Dutch settlers. His mother had Huguenot ancestors. He went to the New York Free Academy where he studied Greek, Latin, maths and sciences. He also attended popular lectures by Robert Ogden Doremus at the Cooper Institute. He did not complete his bachelor's degree but apprenticed for a while under a homeopathic physician who was on the faculty of New York Homeooathic Medical School. He dropped out of this as well and joined the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University[4] receiving an MD in 1867 with a thesis on fatty degeneration of the liver. He then practiced at Irving Place, New York and a year later sought to study chemistry in Germany. He went to the University of Munich where he worked under Jacob Volhard (1834-1910) as well as one series of lectures under Justus von Liebig (1803-1873) who was the main attraction for Remsen to move to Germany.[5] He then went to the University of Göttingen, on the recommedation of Friedrich Wöhler, and studied organic chemistry under Rudolph Fittig (1835-1910). His 1870 doctorate was on investigations on piperic acid and its derivatives.[6] He worked as an assistant to Fittig from 1870 to 1872 and during this time he met William Ramsay (1852-1916).[7]

He married Elisabeth Hilleard Mallory on April 3, 1875, in New York City, New York. They had two children together. Their son, Ira Mallory Remsen (1876–1928), became an artist and playwright living in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California.[8][1]

Career

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In 1872, after researching pure chemistry at University of Tübingen, Remsen returned to the United States and became a professor at Williams College, where he wrote the popular text Theoretical Chemistry.[1] Remsen's book and reputation brought him to the attention of Daniel Coit Gilman, who invited him to become one of the original faculty of Johns Hopkins University. Remsen accepted and founded the department of chemistry there, overseeing his own laboratory. In 1879, Remsen founded the American Chemical Journal, which he edited for 35 years.[1][2][3] He was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1879.[9]

In 1879 Constantine Fahlberg, working with Remsen in a post-doctoral capacity, made an accidental discovery that changed Remsen's career. Eating rolls at dinner after a long day in the lab researching coal tar derivatives, Fahlberg noticed that the rolls tasted initially sweet but then bitter.[10] Since his wife tasted nothing strange about the rolls, Fahlberg tasted his fingers and noticed that the bitter taste was probably from one of the chemicals in his lab. The next day at his lab he tasted the chemicals that he had been working with the previous day and discovered that it was the oxidation of o-toluenesulfonamide he had tasted the previous evening. He named the substance saccharin and he and his research partner Remsen published their finding in 1880. Later Remsen became angry after Fahlberg, in patenting saccharin (along with his uncle Adolph Moritz List), claimed that he alone had discovered saccharin.[11] Remsen had no interest in the commercial success of saccharin, from which Fahlberg profited, but he was incensed at the perceived dishonesty of not crediting him as the head of the laboratory.[10] Fahlberg would soon grow wealthy, while Remsen merely grew irritated, believing he deserved credit for substances produced in his laboratory. In a letter to Scottish chemist William Ramsay,[12][13] Remsen commented, "Fahlberg is a scoundrel. It nauseates me to hear my name mentioned in the same breath with him."[14][15] The controversy would enter court when Constantine Fahlberg, Adolph List, George Merck and Theodore Weicker went to court to sue A. Klipstein & Company of New York for patent violation. Klipstein used the claim that Remsen and Fahlberg were involved in the discovery and that Fahlberg had falsely claimed himself as the inventor. Remsen's testimony was also included in the case but the documents are lost. The suit was ultimately dropped. When the American Chemical Society gave him the Priestley medal in 1923 the citation would mention that Remsen served the science of chemistry and sought no commercial gains from his work.[16]

Cartoon depicting Remsen's position while serving on various committees, c. 1910

Throughout his academic career, Remsen was known as an excellent teacher, rigorous in his expectations but patient with the beginner. "His lectures to beginners were models of didactic exposition, and many of his graduate students owe much of their later success in their own lecture rooms to the pedagogical training received from attendance upon Remsen's lectures to freshmen."[17] Remsen made his teaching laboratory centric. He founded the American Chemical Journal that he edited out of Baltimore and competed with the Journal of the American Chemical Society run by the American Chemical Society. The latter journal did not publish much in organic chemistry. Remsen had joined the ACS in 1878 but he let his membership expire. When he rejoined he was elected president in 1902. In 1913 he allowed his journal to be merged into the ACS journal.[4]

In 1901 Remsen was appointed the president of Johns Hopkins,[1] where he proceeded to found a School of Engineering[18] and helped establish the school as a research university. He introduced many of the German laboratory techniques he had learned and wrote several important chemistry textbooks. In 1912 he stepped down as president, due to ill health, and retired to Carmel, California.[19] While serving as a president of Johns Hopkins, he also took part in civil projects. He served on the Baltimore School Commission in efforts to improve the infrastructure of secondary education. In 1906 he was also involved in improvements to the Baltimore sewerage system. He also served on the Maryland Good Roads Commission. In 1909 he was posted as chairman of a board that dealt with food purity under the department of agriculture. The board came to be popularly called the "Remsen Board". There was considerable pressure from manufacturers to vilify the members of the board who were criticized in the press. A cartoon from this period depicted him sitting on a board with nails.[14]

Death

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He died on March 4, 1927, in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. His ashes are interred behind a plaque in the chemistry building on the Homewood campus at Johns Hopkins University.[1][19]

Legacy

[edit]

In the 37 years of his service he guided 107 PhD students.[20][21] In 1925 eighty-four of his students held positions as professors and forty were heads of chemistry departments in the US.[22] After his death, the new chemistry building, completed in 1924, was named after him at Johns Hopkins. His ashes are located behind a plaque in Remsen Hall; he is the only person buried on campus.[1][23]

His Baltimore house was added to the National Register of Historic Places and declared a National Historic Landmark in 1975.[24]

Remsen Hall in Queens College is also named for him.[25]

Remsen Award

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In 1946, to commemorate the centenary of Remsen, the Maryland chapter of the American Chemical Society, began awarding the Remsen award, in his honor.[26][27][28][29] Awardees are frequently of the highest caliber, and included a sequence of 16 Nobel laureates between 1950 and 1980.

Recipients[30]

References

[edit]
  1. ^ a b c d e f g Stimpert, James (September 11, 2000). "Ira Remsen: The Chemistry Was Right". The Johns Hopkins Gazette. Vol. 30, no. 2. Retrieved February 10, 2021. Ira Remsen was born Feb. 10, 1846, in New York City, of Dutch and Huguenot ancestry. ... Returning to the United States, he took a position as professor of chemistry and physics at Williams College. He found Williams unsympathetic to scientific research, so he concentrated on teaching. Shortly thereafter, he wrote Theoretical Chemistry, in which he reduced fundamental principles to a form simple enough for beginning students to understand. The book received immediate recognition and was soon translated into German and Italian. ... In 1879 he founded the American Chemical Journal, which he edited for 35 years, and he contributed a number of authoritative textbooks that remained standards for many years. ... When Gilman retired from the presidency in 1901, after 25 years, the trustees turned to Ira Remsen to lead the university. ... Ill health forced Remsen to resign from the presidency in 1912, but he recovered sufficiently to rejoin the professional world, serving as a consultant to industry. He died on March 4, 1927. Upon Remsen's death, the Hopkins trustees named the recently completed chemistry building on the Homewood campus in his honor. His ashes are interred behind a plaque in the building.
  2. ^ a b "Member Directory -- Ira Remsen". nationalacademyofsciences.org. National Academy of Sciences. Retrieved February 9, 2021. In addition, he founded the American Chemical Journal in 1879 and served as its editor until 1913.
  3. ^ a b Armstrong, Henry E. (April 1927). "Prof. Ira Remsen". Nature. 119 (2999): 608–609. Bibcode:1927Natur.119..608A. doi:10.1038/119608a0. ISSN 1476-4687. ...he also started the American Chemical Journal, which he carried on until 1914, when it was merged in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. ...
  4. ^ a b Festa, Roger R. (1980). "Ira Remsen (1846-1927)". Journal of Chemical Education. 57 (12): 893. doi:10.1021/ed057p893. ISSN 0021-9584.
  5. ^ Noyes, William A. (September 16, 1927). "Ira Remsen". Science. 66 (1707): 243–246. doi:10.1126/science.66.1707.243. ISSN 0036-8075.
  6. ^ http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/remsen-ira.pdf [bare URL PDF]
  7. ^ Sztejnberg, Aleksander (2022). "Ira Remsen (1846-1927) - the Eminent American Chemist of the Second Half of the XIX Century and the First Quarter of the XX century (To the 95th Anniversary of His Death)". Revista CENIC Ciencias Químicas. 53: 135–151.
  8. ^ "Historical Information for Ira Remsen". FamilySearch. Retrieved September 8, 2022.
  9. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved May 12, 2021.
  10. ^ a b Hicks, Jesse (2010). "The Pursuit of Sweet". Chemical Heritage Magazine. 28 (1). Retrieved March 24, 2018.
  11. ^ "The Johns Hopkins Gazette: September 11, 2000".
  12. ^ Minetor, Randi (November 5, 2021). Debating Your Plate: The Most Controversial Foods and Ingredients. ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-1-4408-7436-9.
  13. ^ Allen, Thomas J.; O'Shea, Rory P. (September 18, 2014). Building Technology Transfer within Research Universities: An Entrepreneurial Approach. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-87653-7.
  14. ^ a b Getman FH (1940). The life of Ira Remsen. Easton, PA: Journal of Chemical Education. p. 66. OCLC 2640159. OL 6411359M.
  15. ^ Newton, David E. (2009). Food Chemistry. Infobase Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4381-0975-6.
  16. ^ Warner, Deborah J. (2008). "Ira Remsen, Saccharin, and the Linear Model". Ambix. 55 (1): 50–61. doi:10.1179/174582308X255415. ISSN 0002-6980.
  17. ^ Getman, Frederick H. (August 1939). "Ira Remsen: Erstwhile Dean of Baltimore Chemists". Journal of Chemical Education. 16 (8): 353. Bibcode:1939JChEd..16..353G. doi:10.1021/ed016p353.
  18. ^ "Ira Remsen, M.D., 1865". Alumni in Memorium. New York Medical College. Retrieved February 10, 2021. He would go on to become one‌ of five founding faculty of Johns Hopkins University in Maryland where he also founded the university's department of chemistry and its school of engineering. He later served as the university's president, the second in its history.
  19. ^ a b Palmer, William P. (August 22, 2018). "Ira Remsen: Stories for chemical education". Chemistry in Australia magazine. The Royal Australian Chemical Institute. Retrieved February 9, 2021. He resigned as President of Johns Hopkins University in April 1912 due to ill health. ... Remsen did not retire completely until his 80th birthday in 1926. He died in Carmel, California, on 4 March 1927.
  20. ^ "Chemistry Award For Dr. Ira Remsen. Priestley Medal Will Be Bestowed Upon Him at Chemical Society's Annual Meeting". New York Times. September 3, 1923. Retrieved October 29, 2010.
  21. ^ "Chemical & Engineering News: The Priestly Medal - 1923: Ira Remsen (1846–1927)".
  22. ^ Hannaway, Owen (1976). "The German Model of Chemical Education in America: Ira Remsen at Johns Hopkins (1876–1913)". Ambix. 23 (3): 145–164. doi:10.1179/amb.1976.23.3.145. ISSN 0002-6980.
  23. ^ "A plaque celebrating chemist and second president of Johns Hopkins..." Getty Images. May 23, 2016.
  24. ^ "National Register Information System". National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service. April 15, 2008.
  25. ^ Watman, Deborah (September 17, 2014). "A $2 million renovation for the laboratories in Remsen Hall". The Knight News. Retrieved February 9, 2021. Built in 1949, Remsen Hall, named after famous chemist Ida [sic] Remsen who began the first PhD program for chemistry in the United States...
  26. ^ Burgison, Raymond M. (May 1, 1957). "The Remsen Memorial Lecture 1946–1957" (PDF). Chesapeake Chemist. 13 (5): 9–10. Retrieved October 18, 2018. It was the intention of the Maryland Section that Remsen Memorial Lecturers should be chemists of outstanding ability, as exemplified by Ira Remsen's long and devoted career as an exponent of the highest standard in teaching and research in chemistry. That the intentions of the Section have been fulfilled is attested by the great honor and esteem that have become associated with the receipt of the Remsen Lectureship.[permanent dead link‍]
  27. ^ a b "American Chemical Society Awards: Priestley Medal". Nature. 158 (4011): 371–372. 1946. Bibcode:1946Natur.158S.371.. doi:10.1038/158371c0. ISSN 0028-0836.
  28. ^ a b Hartford, Winslow H. (1946). "Ira Remsen and Roger Adams--A Chemical Centennial". The Scientific Monthly. 63 (4): 261–267. Bibcode:1946SciMo..63..261H. JSTOR 18751. The year 1946 marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Ira Remsen, first professor of chemistry and second president of The Johns Hopkins University. The chemists of Maryland, through the Maryland Section of the American Chemical Society, have appropriately chosen this year to initiate a series of lectures in his honor, and Professor Roger Adams of the University of Illinois was selected as the first Remsen Lecturer.
  29. ^ National Academy of Sciences (U.S.); National Research Council (U.S.) (1955). Scientific and Technical Societies of the United States and Canada. Publication (National Research Council (U.S.))) (6th ed.). National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council. p. 43. Retrieved November 13, 2018.
  30. ^ "Remsen Award". The Maryland Section of the American Chemical Society. Retrieved February 10, 2021.
  31. ^ "Roger Adams Delivers First Remsen Memorial Lecture at Johns Hopkins". Chemical & Engineering News. 24 (12): 1642. June 25, 1946. doi:10.1021/cen-v024n012.p1642. ISSN 0009-2347.
  32. ^ "Prof. Adams to Give Lecture". The New York Times. May 12, 1946. Retrieved November 13, 2018.
  33. ^ LIND, S. C. (1947). "Fifty Years of Atomic Research". Chemical & Engineering News. 25 (35): 2495–2499. doi:10.1021/cen-v025n035.p2495. ISSN 0009-2347.
  34. ^ "McCollum Delivers Remsen Memorial Lecture". Chemical & Engineering News. 26 (25): 1833–1834. June 21, 1948. doi:10.1021/cen-v026n025.p1833. ISSN 0009-2347.
  35. ^ "Joel H. Hildebrand to Deliver Remsen Memorial Lecture". Chemical & Engineering News. 27 (20): 1429. May 16, 1949. doi:10.1021/cen-v027n020.p1429. ISSN 0009-2347.
  36. ^ Ingle, Dwight J. (September 1, 1910). Read "Biographical Memoirs: V.47" at NAP.edu. doi:10.17226/570. ISBN 978-0-309-02245-3. Retrieved November 20, 2018. {{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)
  37. ^ "News and Notes". Science. 115 (2997): 617–620. June 6, 1952. Bibcode:1952Sci...115..617.. doi:10.1126/science.115.2997.617. ISSN 0036-8075.
  38. ^ "NEWS-MAKERS". Chemical & Engineering News. 30 (13): 1314–1318. March 31, 1952. doi:10.1021/cen-v030n013.p1314. ISSN 0009-2347.
  39. ^ Erg, Joshua Lederb (December 14, 1909). Read "Biographical Memoirs: V.59" at NAP.edu. doi:10.17226/1652. ISBN 978-0-309-04198-0. Retrieved November 20, 2018. {{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)
  40. ^ Hofmann, Klaus (June 12, 1924). Read "Biographical Memoirs: V.56" at NAP.edu. doi:10.17226/897. ISBN 978-0-309-03693-1. Retrieved November 20, 2018. {{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)
  41. ^ "Finding Aid for the Willard F. Libby Papers". Online Archive of California. December 17, 1908. Retrieved November 20, 2018.
  42. ^ Alberty, Robert A. (June 23, 1972). Read "Biographical Memoirs: V.65" at NAP.edu. doi:10.17226/4548. ISBN 978-0-309-05037-1. Retrieved November 20, 2018. {{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)
  43. ^ Calvin, Melvin (May 1, 1957). "The Twelfth Remsen Lecture" (PDF). Chesapeake Chemist. 13 (5): 5–6. Retrieved October 18, 2018.[permanent dead link‍]
  44. ^ "Archives West: Henry Eyring papers, 1915-2010". Archives West. February 22, 1999. Retrieved November 20, 2018.
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  49. ^ "Polanyi, J. C., 1929-". Niels Bohr Library & Archives. Retrieved November 20, 2018.
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  51. ^ "About Richard N. Zare". Stanford University. Retrieved November 20, 2018.
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  62. ^ "Talks and Awards – The Carter Group". carter.princeton.edu. October 10, 2014. Retrieved November 13, 2018.
  63. ^ Wang, Linda (May 4, 2015). "2015 Remsen Award To JoAnne Stubbe". Chemical & Engineering News. 93 (18): 34. doi:10.1016/j.cej.2015.06.095. Retrieved November 13, 2018.
  64. ^ "Dr. Charles M. Lieber Delivers 71st Remsen Award Lecture". Johns Hopkins University – Department of Chemistry. May 16, 2016. Retrieved November 13, 2018.
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  66. ^ "What can ACS local sections do for you?". Chesapeake Chemist. 75 (2): 5. February 1, 2018. Retrieved November 13, 2018.
  67. ^ "Catherine J. Murphy wins the 2019 Remsen Award | Chemistry at Illinois". chemistry.illinois.edu. Retrieved February 10, 2021.
  68. ^ Linda Wang (November 30, 2020). "Remsen Award presented to Tom Muir". C&EN Global Enterprise. 98 (46): 37. doi:10.1021/cen-09846-awards3. S2CID 229386424.
  69. ^ Remsen Award of the American Chemical Society

Further reading

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