Cooke, Josiah Parsons, Jr.

(b Boston, Massachusetts, 12 October 1827; d Newport Rhode Island 3 september 1894),

chemistry.

The son of Josiah Parsons Cooke, a prominent lawyer, and Mary Pratt Cooke, Josiah came from a socially prominent and wealthy family. He graduated from Harvard College in 1848 and spent a year in Europe to improve his health. Throughout his life he suffered from poor eyesight and a tremor of his hands. In 1860 he married Mary Hinckley Huntington, who survived him. They had no children.

Cooke was tutor in mathematics at Harvard in 1849 and instructor in chemistry. In 1850 he was appointed Erving professor of chemistry and mineralogy, a position that he held for the rest of his life. Following this appointment he went to Europe to buy apparatus and chemicals, mostly at his own expense, and attended lectures by Regnault and Dumas.

Laboratory instruction in chemistry combined with demonstration experiments during lectures had been developed by Liebig and had been brought to the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard by E. N. Horsford, a pupil of Liebig’s. Cooke became enthusiastic about this method and was assigned a room about twenty by twenty-five feet in the basement of University Hall for a student laboratory. It took seven years of hard fighting, however, before his course was recongized by the college as anything beyond an extra. Finally, in 1871, new accommodations were secured by addition of a story to Boylston Hall.

In Harvard Hall there was large miscellaneous collection of rocks, minerals, and fossils. Cooke retained Benjamin Silliman, Sr., Of Yale to sort this, and the result became the nucleus for the renowned collection of minerals now housed in the University Museum.

Cooke can be considered the founder of Harvard’s department of chemistry. All his life he strove for expansion of space, equipment, and personnel, providing much of the equipment from his own fund. His lectures were extremely popular with the students. Cooke was a member of a number of learned societies, botably the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Chemical Society of London (foreign honorary member). He received the L. L. D. from Cambridge in 1882 and the same degree from Harvard in 1889. Before his death he was so exasperated by the failure of the university of promote Oliver W. Huntington, his wife’s nephew and his long-time collaborator, that he canceled a large bequest in it favor.

Cooke’s first paper, “The Numerical Relation Between the atomic Weights and Some Thoughts on the classification of the Chemical Elements” (1854), attracted wide attention. He maintained that the elements could be arranged in six series, in the manner of organic compounds. In each series atomic weights progressed by integral multiples of an integer peculiar to that series. Physical and chemical properties progressed analogously.

Cooke carried out two important determinations of atomic weights. In his papers on antimony (1877, 1878, 1879 1882) he indentified three crystaline forms of antimony triiodide. He precipitated antimony sulfide, chloride, bromide, and iodide with silver nitrate, avoiding any precipitation of basic salts by addition of tartaric acid. He analyzed the silver salts of the four anions involved. These resulted in four sets of three ratios each: Ag; S; Sb, Ag: C: Sb, Ag: Br: Sb, and ag: I Sb; The results were most satisfactory with the bromide, where ag: Br: Sb- 107.66:79:75:119:.63, based on H-1,000. These are close to modern values.

In 1842 Dumas had determined the very important ratio of oxygen to hydrogen in water by passing an indeterminate amount of hydrogen over heated cupric oxide and weighing the collected water. Cooke and his pupil Theodore William Richards weighed hydrogen in a five-liter bulb and swept it out over heated was prepared by several different reactions. After the first publication of results (1887) John strutt, the third Baron Rayleigh, pointed out that the volume of hydrogen in the bulb, when evacuated, contracted slightly, so that it displaced less air when weighed. A valid correction was worked out in an “Additional Note” (1888). The final result was an atomic weight of 0 = 15.869 ±0.0017, taking H = 1,000.

Cooke’s Principles of Chemical Philosophy which concluded each chapter with many questions and problems, had wide influence. The London Chemical New said: “So far as our recollection goes, we do not think that there exists in any language a book on so difficult a subject as this so carefully, clearly and lucidly written, “The American Journal of Science said: “To Professor cooke, more than to any American, is due the credit of having made chemistry an exact and disciplinary study in our colleges."

Cooke gave courses of popular lectures in various cities—Lowell and Worcester, Massachusetts. New York, and washington, D.C. The course at Brooklyn Institute of arts and sciences in New York in 1860 was published as Religion and Chemistry or Proof of God’s Plan in the Atmosphere and the Elements (1864). He maintained that the argument from design in similar book, Credentials of Science and the Warrant of Faith, appeared in 1888.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1.Original. Works. A list of Cooke’s more important publications is in Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 30 (1895), 544–547. His papers include “The Relation Between the Atomic Weights,” in Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, n. s. 5 (1854), and in American Journal of Science, 2nd ser., 17 (1854), 387; “On the Process of Reverse Filtering,” in Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 12 (1877). 124–130; “Revision of the Atomic Weights of Antimony,” ibid., 13 (1878), 1–71; “Re-examination of Some of the Haloid Compunds of Antimony,” ibid., 72–114; “The Atomic Weight of Antimony,” ibid., 15 (1879), 251–255; “Contributions From the Chemical Laboratories of Harvard college,” ibid., 17 (1882), 1–22; “The Relative Values of the atomic Weights of Oxygen and Hydrogen,” ibid., 23 (1887), 149–178, written with T. W. Richards; and “Additional Note on the Relative Values of the atomic Weights of Oxygen and Hydrogen,” ibid., 23 (1888). 182, written with T. W. Richards.

Among his books are Elements of Chemical Physics (Boston, 1860, 1866, 1877); Chemical problems and Reactions to Accompany Stockhard’s Elements of Chemistry (Philadelphia, 1863); Religion and Chemistry or Prooof of God’s plan in the Atmosphere and the Elements (New York, 1864; new ed., 1880); Principles of Chemical Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass, 1868; rev; Ed., en., Boston, 1887); and The Credentials of science and the Warrant of Faith (New Youk, 188; new ed., 1893).

II.Secondary Literature. There is an unsigned biographicl sketch in Popular Science Monthly (Feb. 1877). More extensive is Addresses in Commemoration of Josiah Parsons Cook… (Cambridge. Mass., 1895), which includes a biographical sketch. The addresses also appeared in Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 30 (1895), 513–543.

George S. Forbes