Higgins, Bryan

(b. Collooney, County Sligo, Ireland, 1737 or 1741; d. Walford, Starffordshire, England, 1818)

Chemistry.

Qualified as a physician, and remembered chiefly for his speculative chemical theories, it is nevertheless as an entrepreneur of fundamental research and chemical technology that Bryan Higgins most invites attention and remark. His activities in these respects nicely complement the pursuits of his better-known nephew, William. Together their lives offer important glimpses into the cornucopia of opportunities open to chemically knowledgeable residents of the British Isles in the latter part of the eighteenth century. These opportunities were often precariously established and weakly institutionalized. As population, urbanization, chemical knowledge, and manufacturing enterprise all grew rapidly in the early nineteenth century, such ill-defined forms and norms proved unequal to the demands of growth and change vociferously pursued by the propagandists for professional science. It is the more optimistic period immediately prior to such problems which is revealed in the biographies of the two Higginses. The vigor, self-confidence, and sense of chemical possibilities so immediately apparent from those biographies reflect a world of economic expansion and technical development. It was also a world not yet beset by larger social issues or the status doubts and organizational anxieties of a newly self-conscious scientific profession.

Higgins’ father was a physician of considerable repute in County Sligo. of his three sons the eldest was a merchant, and Thomas Higgins (father of William) studied arts and medicine at Edinburgh before taking an M.D. Where Bryan studied is not known. He enrolled at Leiden in October 1765, shortly before graduating there as M.D. Many other important aspects of his life remain cloaked in obscurity. He married a Miss Jane Welland of London, a lady of some means, about 1770. Beyond the fact that she bore him two daughters, no details of their family life are preserved. His settling in the metropolis may well date from the time of his marriage.

Higgins’ wish and ability to engage the London beau monde with the theoretical and practical implications of natural knowledge was uncommon, especially when seen against his Irish Catholic background. In July 1774 he opened his “school of practical chemistry, wherein the pupils might have uncommon advantages, at the same time that my apparatus might be enlarged, and my experiments conducted at a common expense.” This bold solution to the problem of raising the growing capital required for a career of laboratory research apparently met with success. Even so, it was necessary for the school to combine its lofter intellectual goals with more utilitarian aims.

Regular lectures were given for a number of years. An extant syllabus refers to the course as one of philosophical, pharmaceutical, and technical chemistry. As such it probably appealed to students at the London hospitals as well as to the curious, the fashionable, and the manufacturing gentlemen about town. These latter groups must have been considerable. Their recruitment was no doubt aided by the location of Higgins’ school and laboratory in Greek Street, where Josiah Wedgwood had his London showrooms. The address was also conveniently close to Soho Square, the focal point for aspiring London men of science. Assured of gentlemanly support, Higgins pursued the original purposes of his school. This is apparent from Syllabus of Chemical and Philosophical Enquiries, Composed for the Use of Noblemen and Gentlemen who have Subscribed to the Proposals Made for the Advancement of Natural Knowledge (1776). What transpired at these and other sets of discourses and experiments for meetings of the subscribers is not known, but such activity obviously enjoyed considerable favor. Higgins came to include Samuel Johnson (a devotee of chemistry) among his acquaintances, and Edward Gibbon, Joseph Priestley, and Benjamin Franklin were among his early auditors. Finally he was emboldened to issue printed proposals for a considerably more ambitious Society for Philosophical Experiments and Conversations, in November 1793.

The Society was established in Higgins’ laboratory the following January. Its chairman was Field Marshal Henry Conway, an aged but important political figure, and Thomas Young was one of the “assistants in experiments.” The Society met weekly at 8 p.m. throughout the parliamentary session, the five-guinea subscription serving both to delimit the membership and to defray the cost of the apparatus and chemicals. If the tone was polite, the driving force was Higgins himself, as is immediately clear from the subsequently published Minutes of the apparently shortlived group.

Higgins’ solution to the common problem of assembling research equipment and chemical apparatus was unusual and highly imaginative. His other activities were more routine, even including his reported (but unconfirmed) journey to Russia in the 1780’s at the invitation of Catherine II. His visit to Jamaica from late 1796 to 1801, to advise on the making of sugar and rum, presumably owed something to politically well-placed friends. The actual invitation came from the Jamaica House of Assembly. They paid £1,000 a year (retroactively raised to £1,400) for his expert knowledge. His extensive suggestions culminated in Observations and Advices for the Improvement of the Manufacture of Muscovado Sugar and Rum. Such ad hoc technical advice was often resorted to by government, if rarely so freely rewarded, as raw-material processing and chemical manufacturing became increasingly important to an industrializing Britain and her colonies.

Like other chemists of the period, Higgins was engaged with an additional variety of practical problems that caught his own immediate interest. The behavior of mixtures of lime, sand, and water was already under theoretical discussion in his first lecture course. In 1779 he took out a patent for a cement composed of washed sand, slaked lime, limewater, and bone ash. This new combination enjoyed a modest vogue. The following year he published Experiments and Observations Made With the View of Improving the Art of Composing and Applying Calcareous Cements. Six years later he published Experiments and Observations Relating to Acetous Acid, Fixable Air... Oil and Fuels. In 1788 his Synopsis of the Medical Contents of the Most Noted Mineral Waters appeared. This leaflet served as advertisement for the waters purveyed by its publisher, one John Ellison, whose “spruce beer and mineral water machine” served fashionable London from its Whitechapel base. Higgins filed a 1781 patent suggesting chemically sophisticated and ingenious ways of manufacturing soda and potash, a 1767 patent (his first) for an oil lamp designed to look like a candle holder, and an 1802 patent for a warm air heating system.

Beside lecturing, experimenting, consulting, and advising across a broad range of chemical topics, Higgins also developed a considerable business in the manufacture and supply of reagents and chemicals. A surviving print of his Greek Street laboratory shows a room over thirty feet long, well equipped with reverberatory and melting furnaces, sand baths, and other necessary apparatus, including “several thousand flint glass and green bottles and vessels” to hold the products. Forty-foot-high chimneys apparently were necessary to disperse the fumes generated by such manufacturing operations.

Higgins’ publications often interweave detailed discussion of problems in technical chemistry with aspects of his speculative theoretical views. Although he was unable to combine these conjectures with fruitful experimentation, his ideas deserve consideration. Many commentators have seen in his arguments and terminology percipient habingers of later work in chemical atomic theory. If fact his ideas are remote from such post-Lavoisier concerns and, rather, lie within that earlier eighteenth-century tradition of theoretical and empirical inquiry which, taking its inspiration from Newton’s Opticks, saw short-range-force explanations of the interactions of light, heat, and matter as central to any coherent natural philosophy. These subjects are dominant in Higgins’philosophical Essay concerning Light (1776). They are equally pervasive two decades later in the Minutes of his Society for Philosophical Experiments and Conversations. Like such speculative philosophers as Gowin Knight and Bryan Robinson before him, Higgins correctly saw that an understanding of the relations of heat, light, and matter was central to the further development of a Newtonian philosophy. His concerns for such a broad and ambitious topic, especially when cast in the phlogistic mode and based on a theory of seven elements, effectively precluded him from making tangible contributions either to chemical theory or to the allied subjects of heat and optics. Even so, his now rare publications make fascinating reading. They reveal a powerful mind actively grappling with some of the leading theoretical problems of the day.

Higgins’ failure to make substantive progress in confirming his speculative ideas, coupled with the radical transformations occurring in chemical theory in the 1780’s and 1790’s, may have encouraged his retirement from the field. When he accepted the invitation to Jamaica in 1796, he accepted the invitation to Jamaica in 1796, he sold his extensive accumulation of apparatus and chemicals. The “very liberal provision” settled on him by the grateful Jamaica Assembly on his return to Britain in 1801 apparently enabled him to retire to the country. He appears to have played little further part in scientific affairs, although in 1803 he did advise the Royal Institution on its chemical laboratory, at Davy’s behest. Perhaps his “great affability of manner” and his unfortunate early exchange with Joseph Priestley over precedence in discovery prevented his acknowledging the priority dispute about chemical atomic theory which his nephew William later conducted with John Dalton. It was this dispute that brought Higgins to the attention of historians, but his real importance lies elsewhere.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Higgins’ most important writings are A Philosophical Essay Concerning Light (London, 1776);Experiments and Observations Made With the View of Improving the Art of Composing and Applying Calcareous Cements and of Preparing Quicklime: Theory of These Arts and Specification of the Author’s Cheap and Durable Cement, for Building, Incrustation or Stuccoing, and Artificial Stone (London, 1780);Experiments and Observations Air, Oil and Fuels, the Matter of Five and Ligh, Metallic Reduction, Combustion, Fermentation, Putrfaction, Respiration, and Other Subjects of Chemical Philosophy (London, 1786); Minutes of the Society for Philosophical Experiments and Conversations (London, 1795); and Observations and Advices for the Improvement of the Manufacture of Muscovado Sugar and Rum 3 pts. (St. lago de la Vega [Spanish Town], Jamaica, 1797–1801), plus fragment of the fourth part (Jamaica, 1803).

II. Secondary Literature. Much information on the life of Higgins, an extended discussion of his chemical ideas, and a careful (although incomplete) listing of his published works and papers are available in J. R. Partington, History of Chemistry, III (London-New York, 1962), 727–736. Further details of his life may be gleaned from the complex footnotes appended to J. R. Partington and T. S. Wheeler, The Life and Work of William Higgins, Chemist (London, 1960). Although Partington and Wheeler undertook an exhaustive search for MSS and printed information on the Higgins family, F. W. Gibbs showed that there were important sources still unexploited. His brief, only partially documented, but highly suggestive “Bryan Higgins and His Circle,” in Chemistry in Britain, 1 (1965), 60–65, stresses the importance of patronage and personal networks in the period’s chemical science and technology. All subsequent studies of Higgins have perforce been based on the extended, if less than fully reliable, account by W. K. Sullivan in Dublin Journal of Medical science8 (1849), 465–495. The account of Higgins’ laboratory is in S. F. Gray, The Operative Chemist (London, 1828), pp. 72–74. Higgins’ theories, and his verbal claims to have discovered some gases, are fully and aggressively dealt with in Joseph Priestley, Philosophical Empiricism: Containing Remarks on a Charge of Plagiarism Respecting Dr. H—s, Interspersed With Various Observation Relating to Different Kinds of Air (London, 1775). The Newtonian background to Higgins’ ideas is set out in A. Thackray, Atoms and Powers: An Essay on Newtonian Matter-Theory and the Development of Chemistry (Cambridge, Mass., 1970).

Arnold Thackray