Horsford, Eben Norton

(b. Moscow [now Livonia], New York, 27 July 1818; d. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1 January 1893)

chemistry.

Horsford had a strong Puritan background and a long New England ancestry; he was the son of Jedediah Horsford and Charity Maria Norton. His father migrated from Vermont to western New York state and combined farming with missionary activity among the Seneca Indians. In this rustic, frontier setting, Horsford early displayed an interest in nature. To cap a traditional education, he enrolled in 1837 in the Rensselaer Institute, where he studied with Amos Eaton.

For the next half dozen years following graduation Horsford attempted to apply what he had learned in a variety of occupations. He was employed on the newly established New York State Geological Survey under James Hall and was professor of mathematics and natural history at the Albany Female Academy. His interest turned to chemistry, and he experimented with the daguerreotype process in Albany. He also gave lectures in chemistry at Newark College in Delaware (later the University of Delaware), and he became a friend of John W. Webster, an early American chemist at the Harvard Medical School. Albany was then something of a scientific center and a group of friends, headed by Luther Tucker, publisher of the agricultural journal The Cultivator, persuaded Horsford to go to Germany to study chemistry under Liebig. In 1844 Horsford departed for Europe. He spent the next two years at Giessen under Liebig’s immediate tutelage. The second American to study with him, Horsford was instrumental in the transfer of chemical skills and knowledge from Europe to America, as attested to by his many letters and journal.

On returning to America in 1847, Horsford found a ready and conspicuous outlet for his newly acquired talents when he was appointed, through the sponsorship of Webster, Rumford professor “for the application of science to the useful arts” at Harvard University. His peculiarly practical inclinations received further encouragement with the founding of the Lawrence Scientific School, to which, along with Louis Agassiz, he was promptly transferred. Horsford remained at Lawrence until his resignation in 1863, and it is here that he made his principal contributions to chemistry. On the Liebig model, Horsford developed the first laboratory in America for analytical chemistry. He became dean of the school and endeavored to establish its new scientific curricula on a sound and stable basis. He trained many men and he carried on his own practical and useful investigation in such varied fields as the use of lead pipes in Boston’s water distribution, the condensation of milk, and the vulcanization of rubber.

His primary interest was in nutrition, in which he made his most promising and profitable discoveries. Probably motivated by a desire for material gain and encouraged by association with George Wilson, an industrialist who became his partner, Horsford developed a phosphatic baking powder to be used in place of yeast. On the basis of this and related products, the Rumford Chemical Company was established at what became known as Rumford, Rhode Island. The venture in industrial chemistry prospered and Horsford became rich and well known. He abandoned his academic career, but retained lifelong residence in the Harvard community at Cambridge.

The Civil War offered Horsford further opportunity to serve his country scientifically, and he approached both the Army and the Navy with proposals for the military application of chemistry. Chief among these was a compact, chemically determined ration of grain and meat, to be used by the army on the march. A trial manufacture of the ration was made under Horsford’s direct supervision, but it was not successful. In 1873 he served as a United States commissioner to the Vienna Exposition and in 1876 as a juror at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.

In his later years, Horsford returned to the study of Indian languages, which he had begun in his youth among the Senecas. He added to it a preoccupation with, and extensive research in, the Viking discoveries in America, on which he wrote numerous works. He was in addition an active and zealous patron of the newly founded Wellesley College.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. A large part of Horsford’s papers, including his letters, journals, scientific and business documents, is to be found in the Library Archives of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; many others are preserved in the family home, Sylvester Manor, Shelter Island, New York. For information on Horsford’s life before his German training, a period on which little accurate information is available, see his letters in Harvard College Papers, 2nd ser., 13 (1845–1846), Harvard University Archives.

Horsford published many scientific papers in various journals, American and German, among them Silliman’s American Journal of Science and Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Among his papers are “Untersuchungen über Glycocoll,” in Liebig’s Annalen der Chemie und Pharmacie, vol. 60 (1846), written while at Giessen; and “Value of Different Kinds of Vegetable Food, Based Upon the Amount of Nitrogen,” in Transactions of the Albany Institute (1846). The articles of his most productive early years were privately assembled (1851) in a volume of “Original Papers,” now in the Rensselaer archives. His later publications include The Army Ration (New York, 1864); The Theory and Art of Bread-Making (Cambridge, 1861); and A Report on Vienna Bread (Washington, 1875)

II. Secondary Literature. For brief biographical sketches, see Dictionary of American Biography, IX, 236–237, which is especially good; L. C. Newell and T. L. Davis, Notable New England Chemists (Boston, 1928), p. 16; H. S. van Klooster, “Liebig and His American Pupils,” in Journal of Chemical Education, 33 (October 1956), 493 ff.; S. E. Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard University (Cambridge, 1930), 282, 414 ff.; and S. Rezneck, “Horsford’s Marching Ration for the Civil War Army,” in Military Affairs, 33 (1969), 249–255; and “The European Education of an American Chemist and Its Influence in Nineteenth Century America: Eben Norton Horsford,” in Technology and Culture, 11 (1970), 366–388.

Samuel Rezneck