Gilbert, Joseph Henry

(b. Hull, England, 1 August 1817; d. Harpenden, England, 23 December 1901)

agricultural chemistry.

Lawes was educated at Eton and Oxford; he left without taking a degree, although he had cultivated an amateur’s taste for chemistry and pharmacy. In 1834 he inherited the manor and estate of Rothamsted; and two years later, becoming interested in the problems of a neighboring landowner, he began his agricultural experiments. Having seen that ground bones, or “mineral phosphates,” were highly effective as manures on some fields but useless on the majority, Lawes was able to devise a method—treatment with acids—that made them universally effective. (Acids convert insoluble tricalcium phosphate into more soluble monocalcium salt, a process that acidic soils perform naturally.) Despite the opposition of his mother, who was bitterly opposed to “trade,” he acquired a factory at Deptford Creek and in the summer of 1843 began the manufacture of “superphosphate,” using the profits to finance further experiments at Rothamsted. In the same year he engaged Gilbert to assist him in this work, especially in the performance of chemical analyses; and a rough laboratory was improvised in a converted barn. Gilbert, although partly blinded by a gun accident when a boy, had studied chemistry at Glasgow University and University College, London, and, for a short time, under Liebig at Giessen. The collaboration of Lawes and Gilbert lasted for more than fifty years, and together they built Rothamsted into a world-famous institution. In character they were complementary: Lawes was the organizer, the man of affairs, impatient of detail, dealing in large ideas and general principles; Gilbert was a laboratory chemist, methodical and fussily accurate, a diligent attender of scientific meetings.

In 1840, Liebig published Die organische Chemie in ihre Anwendung auf Agriculture und Physiologie—translated into English in the same year by Lyon Playfair—which expounded his belief that manures were effective only by virtue of their mineral content and that nitrogenous and humus-forming manures were unnecessary and wasteful. These views were set out with such clarity and force, and Liebig’s authority was so great, that they were widely believed, although they ran counter to most farming experience and were based on the slenderest experimental evidence. Lawes and Gilbert, in a long series of carefully planned field experiments, were able to show by 1851 that, as far as nitrogen was concerned, Liebig was in error, although they did not solve the puzzle of the nitrogen balance of leguminous plants. During this study they evolved the “chessboard” system of random plots for field trials on the fields of Broadbalk and Barnfield.

During the 1850’s the financial basis of Rothamsted was in danger because of the widespread pirating of the superphosphate patent. Lawes spent much of this decade in protracted lawsuits; but his eventual victory enabled him to extend his experiments to long-term studies of grassland economy, animal feeding, and water balance. His work on the agricultural utilization of sewage led to Lawes being appointed to membership of a Royal Commission in 1857.

As must be inevitable in such lengthy projects a certain stagnation eventually became obvious. This was due partly to Gilbert’s innate conservatism, which, as he grew older, hardened into intolerance of younger chemists and new ideas. Rather than collaborate with younger colleagues, he built up over the years a corps of village boys, each highly skilled in one operation of analytical chemistry. His iron rule over this little empire fitted in well with Lawes’s paternalistic supervision of his manor. But Lawes began to feel that he had to make innovations, and in 1876 he appointed Robert Warington as his personal assistant. Gilbert took this as a deliberate affront, and personal relations were never quite easy at Rothamsted again; for lack of cooperation, Warington achieved little.

Lawes sold the superphosphate business in 1872, although he then had other interests in the manufacture of tartaric and citric acids. In 1889 he put Rothamsted under the control of the Lawes Agricul-tural Trust, with an endowment of £100,000, so that its work would not cease with his death (unlike the parallel enterprise of Boussingault in France); it continues to the present day. He was elected fellow of the Royal Society in 1854 and was made a baronet in 1882; Gilbert was elected fellow of the Royal Society in 1860 and was knighted in 1893.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. The work of Lawes and Gilbert was published entirely in the form of papers, under both joint and separate authorship, mostly in the Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society. After their deaths a summary of their work, incorporating much previously unpublished material, was written by A. D. Hall: The Book of the Rothamsted Experiments (London, 1905). Their collected papers (not quite complete) were published as The Rothamsted Memories on Agricultural Chemistry and Physiology, 7 vols. (London, 1893-1899).

II. Secondary Literature. There are several obituary notices, including (Lawes) Proceedings of the Royal Society, 75 (1905), 228; Journal of the Chemical Society,79 (1901), 890; Nature,]62 (1900), 467;Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society,61 (1900),511; (Gilbert) Proceedings of the Royal Society, 75 (1905), 237; Journal of the Chemical Society,81 (1902),625;Nature,65 (1902),205;Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society,62 (1901), 347. E. Grey, Rothamsted Experiment Station: Reminiscences, Tales and Anecdotes 1872-1922 (Harpenden, 1922), is exactly described by its title. The best account of their work is in E. J. Russell, A History of Agricultural Science in Great Britain, 1620-1954 (London, 1966). Both of these books, and many of the obituary notices, include portraits.

W. V. Farrar