Background

Benjamin Collins Brodie, Jr. was born on February 5, 1817, in London, England, the son of Benjamin Collins Brodie, Sr., physiologist and surgeon at St. George's Hospital, and his wife Anne Sellon.

Education

Benjamin Brodie, Jr. was educated at Harrow School from where he won a classics scholarship to Caius College, Cambridge. However, his father, preferring him to be educated as a commoner, sent him to Balliol College, Oxford in 1835. There, under the influence of the mathematical physicist Baden Powell, his interests turned away from classics to mathematics. He also attended chemical lectures given by Charles Daubeny in the basement of the Ashmolean building opposite Balliol.

Brodie, Jr. graduated in 1838, but because of his refusal to assent to the 39 Articles of the established Church of England, he was unable until 1860 to obtain the Master of Arts degree essential for a respectable academic career at Oxford and he was always denied a College fellowship.

For some time after graduation Brodie, Jr. trained for the bar at Lincoln’s Inn in the chambers of an uncle. In 1844, however, he met Justus Liebig as a guest in his father’s house and immediately abandoned the law to study chemistry at Giessen, where he was awarded a doctorate in 1850 for the analysis of beeswax.

Career

In the decade following his return to England, Brodie, Jr. worked in his own private laboratory in Albert Road, near Regent’s Park, where he taught chemistry to his friend and later Oxford mineralogical colleague, Nevil Story Maskelyne. In 1847 he joined the Royal Institution (Ri) as an assistant to William Brande (a close friend of his father’s), where he came into contact with Michael Faraday whose negative views on atomism must have greatly influenced him.

On Brande’s retirement in 1853 Brodie, Jr. hoped to succeed him and to transform the Royal Institution into a research institution on the Liebig Giessen model, but he was strongly opposed by the managers who disapproved of the "advanced" and unpopular character of his lectures.

By 1850 Brodie, Jr. had established himself as a leading experimental and theoretical chemist. Brodie’s early chemical work, which was implicitly atomistic, was an attempt to reconcile Berzelian electrochemical dualism with the most recent Gerhardtian ideas concerning the self-combinations of atoms. He was intensely interested in allotropy, which he believed to be due to the arrangement and electric charges of the particles making up an element. He discovered that iodine catalyzed the conversion of yellow into red phosphorus and that pure graphite, when treated with potassium chlorate, formed a crystalline graphitic acid, which he speculated might contain a graphite radical, (Gr) or graphon. His process for the purification of graphite, which he patented, proved of considerable technical value.

In 1855, despite considerable opposition from theological fellows, Brodie, Jr. succeeded Daubeny as professor of chemistry at Oxford, where he did much to gain recognition for chemistry as an academic study, as well as proper laboratory facilities for its teaching. At that time, he was also one of the British delegates to the conference on molecular weights in Karlsruhe.

At the beginning of the 1860s, Brodie, Jr. turned his back on the structuralist tendency of organic chemists such as Williamson and Adolph Wurtz and professed a determined skepticism towards the truth and conventional utility of the atomic theory. His sustained opposition to Dalton’s atomism during the last twenty years of his life proved the most remarkable philosophical and theoretical achievement of his career. As a positivist dedicated to the removal of the metaphysical from the science he strongly objected to the realism implied by the availability of molecular models made of balls and wires that contemporary instrument makes had placed on the market following the symbolism introduced by Alexander Crum Brown and Edward Frankland. Brodie’s position was that the ultimate nature of matter was unknowable; chemistry had to be based solely on observational phenomena.

In 1866 the Royal Society began to publish Brodie’s "The Calculus of Chemical Operations," which introduced Greek symbols for the chemical elements to replace the Roman alphabet (Berzelian) symbols that contemporary chemists used to represent atomic weights. Brodie’s symbols, however, represented operations on space (volumes), not weights for, besides its revolutionary symbolism, the calculus also demanded an appreciation of George Boole’s algebraic logic, which Brodie, Jr. had studied after the publication of Boole’s Investigation of the Laws of Thought in 1854.

Brodie, Jr. resigned from Oxford in 1872 because of ill-health and retired to a magnificent house on the top of Box Hill in Surrey. In the same year he published a paper on the action of electricity on oxygen which confirmed by the calculus suggestions that the ozone molecule was triatomic, and introduced the well-known apparatus for the preparation of ozone, "Brodie’s ozoniser".

Achievements

• Benjamin Collins Brodie, Jr. was a chemist, who is chiefly known for his investigations on the allotropic states of carbon and for his discovery of graphitic acid. In addition, he did an original analysis of beeswax and worked on peroxides in his private laboratory.
  
  There are collections of Benjamin Brodie, Jr. manuscripts at the University of Leicester and at the Oxford Museum of History of Science.

Works

More photos

• book

  • On the Atomic Weight of Graphite 1859
  • The Calculus Of Chemical Operations 1866
  • On the Mode of Representation afforded by the Chemical Calculus, as contrasted with the Atomic Theory 1867

Membership

• 

  Benjamin Collins Brodie, Jr. did original analysis of beeswax for which he was given the Fellowship of the Royal Society in 1849.

  Royal Society , United Kingdom

  1849

• 

  From 1850 to 1856, Benjamin Brodie, Jr. was Secretary of the Chemical Society (now Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC)), and its President from 1859 to 1861.

  Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) , United Kingdom

  1850 - 1861

Connections

In 1848, Benjamin Collins Brodie, Jr. married Philothea Margaret, daughter of John Vincent Thompson. They had one son and five daughters.

Father:

Benjamin Brodie, Sr.

Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, Sr., 1st Baronet, was a British physiologist and surgeon at St. George's Hospital for over thirty years. Benjamin Brodie, Sr. increased the knowledge of diseases of joints by his prolonged studies of their clinical and pathological manifestations.

Mother:

Anne Brodie (Sellon)

Sister:

Maria Eliza Hoare (Brodie)

Brother:

William Brodie

Wife:

Philothea Margaret Brodie (Thompson)

Son:

Benjamin Brodie

colleague:

Mervyn Herbert Nevil Story Maskelyne

Mervyn Herbert Nevil Story Maskelyne was a British geologist and politician. He taught mineralogy and chemistry at Oxford from 1851, before becoming a professor of mineralogy, 1856-1895.

References

• A History of Chemistry, Vol. 4
  1964
• Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Volume II
  1970