SILLIMAN, BENJAMIN, JR.

(b New Haven, Connecticut, 4 December 1816: d New Haven, 14 January 1885)

chemistry, geology.

Silliman was the fourth child and second son of Benjamin Silliman, professor of chemistry at Yale College, and Harriet Trumbull. After graduation from Yale College in 1837, he studied and did research in his father’s laboratory, earning an M.A. in 1840. He also worked briefly in the private laboratory of the well-known Boston chemist Charles T. Jackson.

In 1838 Silliman began to assist his father on the internationally known American Journal of Science and Arts. His name appeared on the masthead in 1841, and he continued in various editorial capacities until his death. This work brought him into contact with many foreign scientists, a number of whom visited his father’s house and later his own, and gave him a broad knowledge of the progress of scientific research.

In the late 1830’s Silliman also began to assist his father on lecture tours and mining surveys. These trips widened his acquaintance with American scientists, gave him experience in the effective presentation of science, of which his father was a master, and offered training in practical geology.

On 14 May 1840 Silliman married Susan Huldah Forbes. They had seven children, of whom a son (Benjamin) and four daughters lived to maturity. A man of great personal charm, tremendous energy, and enthusiasm, Silliman was warmhearted and trusting to a fault. He dispensed hospitality generously, sent his daughters to Europe to study, and in general lived on a scale beyond his professional salary.

Silliman was one of the fifty original members of the National Academy of Sciences, incorporated by act of Congress in 1863. He was an associate fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of many other societies in the United States and abroad. He received an honorary M.D. from the Medical College of South Carolina in 1849 and an LL.D. from Jefferson Medical College in 1884.

Silliman’s professional career may be divided into four areas: contributions as an editor of the American Journal of Science, as a teacher and author of textbooks, as an analytical chemist doing experimental work, and as a consultant in chemistry and geology.

Silliman’s long and effective career as a teacher started in 1842, when he began providing laboratory experience for his father’s students interested in advanced training. Many were only slightly his junior: and together they turned out creditable work in the small laboratory, several studies appearing in the American Journal of Science and Arts. One of these students, John Pitkin Norton, who later studied in Europe, succeeded on his return, with the help of the Sillimans, in persuading the Corporation of Yale College to establish two professorships in 1846: agricultural chemistry (to which Norton was appointed) and applied chemistry (to which Silliman was appointed). The need to provide a degree for graduates of the School of Applied Chemistry (later the Yale Scientific School and finally the Sheffield Scientific School) led to the establishment in 1847 of the Department of Philosophy and the Arts (subsequently the Graduate School) and of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, the first to be awarded in the United States (1863).

Since he and Norton received no salary from Yale, Silliman had to leave Norton to carry on alone in 1849 and accepted the professorship of medical chemistry and toxicology in the medical department at the University of Louisville, Kentucky. He returned to Yale in 1854 as professor of general and applied chemistry when his father retired.

In 1847 Silliman published the first of two textbooks that were clearly written, well arranged, and justifiably popular for many years in American colleges. Some fifty thousand copies of the First Principles of Chemistry, to which T. Sterry Hunt contributed the section on organic chemistry, were sold in the first twenty-five years. His First Principles of Physics or Natural Philosophy (1859) was, according to J. D. Dana, long the best-known textbook in physics in the country. Both volumes showed broad knowledge and Silliman’s remarkable ability to synthesize, explain, and extract from the work of others with great clarity and effectiveness, which made his books especially useful to students.

As a laboratory investigator Silliman never had a well-defined program. His choice of research projects reflected his own wide-ranging interests and the practical problems addressed to him by men who were concerned with economic development of the country’s resources but had no scientific knowledge. Certain interests persisted, however-mineralogy, petroleum, coal, precious metals, and combustion of gases for illumination (he was a director of the New Haven Gas Works for many years).

Silliman’s selected bibliography, which includes thirteen books and pamphlets and nearly a hundred papers, does not list many of the often extensive reports written for private clients. One of these was probably his most important publication, for it launched the world’s petroleum industry. In a report dated 16 April 1855, he set forth his methods and results in a chemical analysis of rock oil from Venango Country. Pennsylvania, and recommended uses of the several products discovered. Silliman used fractional distillation to break down the components-a method utilized in Europe but little employed in America for that purpose. He identified kerosene, an inexpensive and safe illuminant: paraffin, better than tallow for candles: lubricants, to replace animal grease: and, by passing crude petroleum through heated coke, an illuminating gas of high quality. For a low-boiling fraction (gasoline) he could propose no use. That had to await the development of the internal combustion engine, but for the next half century the petroleum industry utilized the other components and the methods (including steam distillation) that Silliman suggested for preparing and purifying them. This report showed his potential as an original, imaginative investigator-a potential not realized in subsequent work.

Another important publication, not supplanted to this day, was American Contributions to Chemistry, a biographical dictionary of American chemists including bibliographies of their work prepared for the “centennial of chemistry”, a celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the discovery of oxygen, and presented in part on 1 August 1874 at Northumberland, Pennsylvania, Priestley’s place of residence in America. It involved a tremendous amount of work and, on the whole, was remarkably complete and accurate.

Silliman had of necessity been augmenting his meager professiorial salary for some time, as did his father¹ and most other members of the academic community, by outside commissions of various sorts: and in 1864 he made a year-long trip to California to seek new opportunities. It was a time of great excitement about the resources of the country, and Silliman shared the general curiosity about undeveloped lands in the West. On this and several subsequent trips he examined many properties for clients eager to capitalize on his reputation as a geologist–both potential oil-yielding sites and gold and silver mines. Enthusiasm excited by the promise of great oil and mineral wealth, coupled with his natural optimism, resulted in generally favorable reports, useful to promoters in the formation of companies with authorized capital in the millions. Never quoted were more guarded statements or conditions that Silliman specified must be met if results were to justify promise. Although they were based on sometimes brief and insufficient study, the majority of his predictions ultimately were realized, partly because of his sound knowledge of geology and an intuitive ability to sense unseen potentials.

Silliman’s enthusiastic lectures on California’s rich resources, with special mention of oil in the southern part of the state, brought him into conflict with the head of the California Geological Survey, Josiah D. Whitney, and his former assistant, Silliman’s friend and student William H. Brewer, professor of agriculture in the Scientific School (1864–1903); both were on record as saying that there was no oil in southern California. Fearing that Silliman’s opinion would jeopardize the Survey, Whitney mounted a vicious attack, one of the most acrimonious and bitter in the annals of science, that continued intermittently, with Brewer’s help, until Silliman’s death. He accused Silliman of deliberately spindling the public for large fees and thus of degrading all scientists. Whitney was aided by the failure of the oil company formed on the basis of Silliman’s report and by the fact that the oil sample on which Silliman had based part of his judgment proved to be “salted.”² Damaging, too, to Silliman was the subsequent failure of silver and gold mining companies the formation of which had also been assisted by his enthusiastic reports.

Silliman’s enemies were unable to have him ousted from the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, or Yale; but they did hurt his scientific reputation and they forced him to resign (1870) from Yale College (but not from the medical faculty) and to sever connections with the Sheffield Scientific School. They also turned friends against him and brought disgrace and anguish to him and his family.

Silliman amassed an enormous file of evidence to support his opinions in response to Whitney’s charges before the National Academy of Sciences, printed the “salted” oil report in the American Journal of Science and Arts, and promised an investigation; but thereafter he maintained a dignified silence and outwardly cheerful mien. He did not gloat, publicly or privately, when improved methods and machinery yielded rich oil strikes in the late 1870’s in southern California, or when the Bodie mine (California) produced gold beyond even his great expectations and a report of a Congressional investigation of the Emma mine (Utah) contained no criticism of his judgment.³

Silliman’s excellent reputation as an editor, teacher, and author of useful books remains undiminished. As a laboratory investigator he was careful and methodical but showed originality only on rare occasions, as in the investigation of rock oil in 1855 and in the use of certain techniques–such as the production of daguerreotype pictures by the light of the carbon arc and the use of an improved goniometer, based on a modification of a European model, in his examination of American micas. Had his energies not been diverted into so many channels, Silliman might have made more notable contributions to chemistry. His geological work showed excellent training, extensive knowledge, and sound judgment. It was when he ventured from academic surroundings into the commercial world that his optimism and guilelessness helped to create circumstances that led to his undoing. The ultimate vindication of his judgment on the important issues could not erase his personal tragedy, but it did restore for the record his reputation as a scientist.

NOTES

1. See, for example, Margaret W. Rossiter, “Benjamin Silliman and the Lowell Institute: The Popularization of Science in Nineteenth-Century America.” in New England Quarterly. 44 (1971). 602–626.

2. It was later thought that Silliman never explained what he discovered in his investigation of the salted sample because John B. Church, the husband of his eldest sister, might have been implicated.

3. Silliman’s testimony before the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives (the investigation ran from February to May 1876) gave him the opportunity to state under oath that his fee for two trips to the mine in Utah was $25,000. less than half the amount that his adversaries had claimed.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Silliman’s most important books include First Principles of Chemistry (Philadelphia-Boston, 1847; rev. 1850, 1853); First Principles of Physics, or Natural Philosophy (Philadelphia, 1859; 2nd ed., 1861): A Century of Medicine and Chemistry (New Haven, 1871); and American Contributions to Chemistry(Philadelphia, 1874). Pamphlets are Fuel for Locomotive Steam Use (New York, 1855) and Report on the Rock Oil, or Petroleum, From Venango Co., Pennsylvania (New Haven, 1855).

His papers include “A Daguerreotype Experiment by Galvanic Light,” in American Journal of Science43 1842). 185 – 186, written with W. H. Goode: “On the Use of Carbon in Grove’s Battery,” ibid., 393: “Report on the Intrusive Trap of the New Red Sandstone of Connecticut,” ibid., 47 (1844), 107 – 108; “On the Chemical Composition of the Calcareous Corals,” ibid., 2nd ser., 1 (1846), 189 – 199: “Optical Examination of Several American Micas,” ibid., 10 (1850), 372 – 383; On the Existence of the Mastodon in the Deep-Lying Gold Placers of California,” ibid., 45 (1868), 378 – 381; “On Flame Temperatures in Their Relations to Composition and Luminosity,” ibid., 49 (1870), 339 – 347, written with Henry Wurtz (repr, in Chemical News, Journal of the Franklin Institute, Philosophical Magazine, and Journal of Gas-lighting, Water-supply and Sanitary Improvement [London]); “Researches on Water-Gas,” In Journal of Gas-lighting, Water-supply, and Sanitary Improvement, 24 (1874), 544 – 545, 574 – 576, 608 – 610, 640 – 641, 675 – 677, written with Henry Wurtz — this paper appeared first as a book in 1869 and in the American Gas-Light Journal and Chemical Repertory, beginning with the issue of 16 Jan. 1874, p. 21.

There are important collections of letters, diaries, reports, and memorabilia pertaining to Silliman and his work at the Yale University Library, in the archives of the National Academy of Sciences, at the Bancroft Library (University of California), the Stanford University Library, the Huntington Library (San Marino, California), and the DeGolyer Foundation Library (Dallas, Texas). For details concerning these materials and further sources, see Gerald T. White (below).

II. Secondary Literature. There is no full-length biography of Silliman. The best source for the period 1865 – 1885 is Gerald T. White, Scientists in Conflict. The Beginnings of the Oil Industry in California (San Marino, Calif., 1968), which contains the substance of a number of earlier papers by White and, through its bibliographical note and extensive footnotes, is an excellent guide to the sources by and about Silliman. Other sources are Russell H. Chittenden. History of the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University 1846 – 1922, 1 (New Haven, 1928), esp. 38, 42, 45 – 51, 64, 66. 69, 110, 116, 122, 287: {James Dwight Dana], “Benjamin Silliman,” in American Journal of Science, 29 (1885), 85 – 92; W. L. Kingsley, Yale College: A Sketch of Its History, II (New York, 1879), 81 – 83, 105 – 107; Louis I. Kuslan, “The Founding of the Yale School of Applied Chemistry,” in Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 24 (1969), 430 – 451; and Arthur W. Wright, “Biographical Memoir of Benjamin Silliman 1816 – 1885,” in Biographical Memoirs, National Academy of Sciences, 7 (1913), 115 – 141.

Elizabeth H. Thomson