Edward Mallinckrodt was an American manufacturer of chemicals and benefactor of educational institutions.
Background
Edward Mallinckrodt was born on January 21, 1845, on a farm near St. Louis, Missouri. He was the son of Emil and Eleanor Didier (Luckie) Mallinckrodt.
His father, disheartened by conditions in Germany, had emigrated fourteen years before from Westphalia, home of the grandfather, Arnold Mallinckrodt, a Dortmund publisher.
Education
Edward's parents had looked forward to his remaining on the farm, but when he was eighteen Liebig's treatises turned him to chemistry.
Accordingly his father, who was then visiting in Germany, made arrangements for Edward and Otto, a younger son, to study the subject there, and Edward spent the next three years in Fresenius' laboratory, Wiesbaden, near Hanover, and the University of Berlin.
Career
Returning in 1867, Edward and Otto joined an elder brother, Gustav, under the firm name of G. Mallinckrodt & Company, in what was a pioneer undertaking in the Middle West, the manufacture of chemicals. The enterprise had an unpretentious start, being housed in a small, rough structure on the parental farm.
With the West undeveloped and the South prostrated by the Civil War, St. Louis was an unfavorable location. Since it was necessary, moreover, to send products East to compete with established firms, hardships were many in the first decade. Otto and Gustav died six months apart (1876 - 77), and in 1882 the business was incorporated as the Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, with Edward as president.
Although learned in chemical technology, he now devoted himself to the commercial side of the business and the enterprise grew rapidly. Before he died its output included 1, 500 chemical products, and it maintained offices or branches in New York, Jersey City, Toronto, and Montreal. In 1889, he formed the National Ammonia Company with subsidiaries as far away as Australia.
The press called him the "ammonia king. " He was also active in the Phosphorous Compounds Company at Niagara Falls and the St. Louis Union Trust Company. He died soon after his eighty-third birthday, of pneumonia following a heart attack, and was buried in Bellefontaine Cemetery, St. Louis.
Achievements
Membership
Mallinckrodt was a member of the Washington University board.
Personality
Mallinckrodt was an owner of downtown real estate in St. Louis. Wealth enabled him to indulge a generous nature. His largest single gift, $500, 000 to Harvard for its chemical laboratory, named for him, was made because he felt that although chemistry held more potential benefits than any other science, American facilities for its study were inferior to those in some other countries.
Further gifts endowed departments in Washington University Medical School and helped to complete its $1, 000, 000 Mallinckrodt Radiological Institute. He established a ward in the St. Louis Children's Hospital in memory of his wife. St. Luke's Hospital, which he helped direct for twenty-five years, as president part of the time, received numerous grants, and the St. Louis College of Pharmacy, which he headed, funds for a scholarship.
His will gave approximately $2, 000, 000 to such "benevolent, scientific, charitable, literary or educational" agencies as his only son should see fit to benefit. An expert gardener, he was at eighty still caring for the flowers about his homes.
Connections
On June 7, 1876, Mallinckrodt married Jennie Anderson of St. Louis, who died in 1913.