Background

Henry Enfield Roscoe was born on January 7, 1833, in London, England. Roscoe was the son of Henry Roscoe, a Liverpool barrister, and judge. His mother was Maria Roscoe, née Fletcher, and he was also a grandson of William Roscoe. His only sister, Harriet, was born in 1836.

His father, a Liverpool barrister, had moved to London in 1819 to seek his fortune in the bar, and after retiring very early, was appointed Judge of the Court of Passage in Liverpool (1834). He died in 1836, at the age of thirty-seven, leaving the family in financial stress. His mother, who had artistic gifts, improved the family income by teaching watercolor painting at a girl's school. Henry thought that he was going to be a physician but his uncle Richard Roscoe strongly discouraged his mother from allowing him to do so, explaining that medicine was a very difficult career, which probably would kill her son. In 1842 the family moved to Liverpool.

Education

Roscoe studied at the Liverpool Institute for Boys. After that Roscoe attended the University College London in 1848 and in 1853, he received his Bachelor of Arts degree with Honors. He then studied chemistry at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, in the 1850s after 1852.

Later in life, Roscoe received an honorary doctorate Legum Doctor (LL.D) from the University of Glasgow in June 1901.

Career

At the beginning of his second year of studies at the University College, London, Roscoe joined the Birkbeck Chemical Laboratory, directed by Alexander William Williamson (1824–1904), who shortly thereafter let him carry original research. After succeeding to Graham's chair, Williamson appointed Roscoe his assistant in the general chemistry class for the winter session of 1855–1856.

After Roscoe received his Bachelor of Arts degree with Honors in chemistry in 1853, he traveled to Heidelberg to work with Robert Wilhelm Bunsen. Bunsen taught Roscoe quantitative techniques and gas analysis and encouraged him in original research. One of his first quantitative projects was on silicate analysis, which led to a first paper, published with Eduard Schönfeld (1828–1891), about the composition of certain samples of gneiss, which is a common and widely distributed type of rock formed by high-grade regional metamorphic processes from pre-existing formations that were originally either igneous or sedimentary rocks. In addition, Roscoe translated into English Bunsen's book on Gasometry. At the end of his second year, Roscoe passed his doctor's oral examination summa cum laude and then begun, together with Bunsen, in their famous studies in photochemistry, which occupied much of his time and energy during the next eight years.

In 1856 Roscoe returned to London and established a private laboratory in Bedford Place, employing William Dittmar (1833–1892) as his assistant. He also began teaching at an army school at Eltham and did analytical work on the air of dwellings for a Departmental Committee. He analyzed the air of the soldiers sleeping rooms in Wellington Barracks when the men were in bed, visited many schoolrooms, as well as artisan's residences, and determined the amount of CO2 contained in the air of a crowded theater.

In 1857, Edward Frankland (1825–1899), the first professor of chemistry at the recently established Owens College of Manchester, resigned and Roscoe applied and was accepted for the position. Roscoe closed his London laboratory and began his new duties, taking Dittmar with him as his assistant. Owens College had opened in 1851 but when Roscoe joined it there were only thirty-four students; the College had reached such level of discredit that Roscoe was even refused lodgings when the landlord learned of his affiliation. He reformed the chemical curriculum and gave it a solid reputation. As a result of his, efforts Owens College became the leading chemistry school in the country.

The blockade of Confederate ports by the Union, during the American Civil War, with the consequent interruption of baled cotton imports, generated a serious social and economic crisis to the textile industry of North West England. The resulting Cotton Famine (1861–1865) resulted in Lancashire's cotton mills running out of raw cotton to process, high unemployment, and the region going from high prosperity to poverty and famine. In order to try to help improve the despair of the working class, Roscoe and some of his friends developed the idea of providing the unemployed with intellectual recreation, and initiative, which turned to be a resounding success. Roscoe and his friends gave more than one hundred presentations on musical, scientific, geographical, and other subjects to audiences averaging over 4000 a week.

The success of these first attempts stimulated Roscoe to initiate the Science Lectures for the People, which were given for eleven years by many famous scientists, among them the biologists Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) and William Benjamin Carpenter (1813–1885), the mathematician and physicist William Spottiswoode (1825–1883), the physicist John Tyndall (1820–1893), and the astronomer William Huggins (1824–1910). Eventually, the eleven series of lectures were collected and printed in Manchester as Science Lectures for the People and sold at a penny each. All these activities led to the foundation of the Working Men's College in Manchester.

Roscoe stayed as head of the Chemical Department of Owens College until his election as Member of Parliament for the Southern Division of Manchester in 1885 when he resigned the Professorship of Chemistry.

Roscoe published over 150 papers, reports, conferences, and books. His Lessons in Elementary Chemistry (Roscoe, 1866b) and Chemistry in the Science Primer Series for Macmillan were widely adopted and translated into nine languages. His comprehensive Treatise on Chemistry, written with Carl Schorlemmer (1834–1892), appeared in 1877–1884. His lectures before the Society of Apothecaries, published as Spectrum Analysis, went through several editions. Roscoe also wrote a biography of Dalton and A New View of the Origin of Dalton's Atomic Theory, in collaboration with Arthur Harden, and an Autobiography.

Achievements

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  Roscoe's main research achievements were done in the field of inorganic chemistry. His first important work, on the laws of photochemical actions, was conducted with Bunsen during the years 1855–1862. In them, they established the foundations of comparative photochemistry, the determination of its laws, and development of an actinometer, based on the reaction of chlorine and hydrogen under light, which allowed a precise quantitative analysis of the action of light. Bunsen and Roscoe demonstrated that the amount of photochemical action produced by a constant source varied inversely as the square of the distance and that the absorption varied directly as the intensity.
  
  They also measured the chemical action of the parts of the solar spectrum, describing the existence of several maximums of chemical intensity. His most important research was on vanadium and its compounds. He was the first to develop a process for preparing pure metallic vanadium and showing that the substance, which had previously passed for the metal was contaminated with oxygen. In so doing he corrected Berzelius's value for the atomic mass. Roscoe was awarded the 1868 Bakerian Lecture for this work. He also carried out researches on niobium, tungsten, uranium, and their oxides and oxychlorides, on perchloric acid, and the solubility of ammonia and chlorine in water.
  
  Roscoe received many awards and honors on account of his scientific, educational, and industrial contributions. He was awarded the Royal Medal of the Royal Society (1873) “for his various chemical researches, more especially for his investigations of the chemical action of light and of the combinations of vanadium” and delivered the Bakerian Lectures for 1865 and 1868. His 1865 Bakerian lecture was about a method of meteorological registration of the chemical action of daylight (Roscoe, 1865), and the 1868 one about vanadium and the determination of its atomic mass.
  
  He was also awarded the Dalton Medal of the Philosophical Society of Manchester and the Elliot Cresson Gold Medal of the Franklin Institute (1912). In 1883 Oxford University conferred him an honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law, and Dublin (1878), Cambridge (1883), Montreal (1884), and Glasgow (1901) an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws (LL.D.).
  
  Roscoe was elected into the Royal Society in 1863 and served twice as its Vice-President. He was one of the original members of the Society of Chemical Industry and became its first president. He joined the Chemical Society in 1855 and served as its Vice-President, and President. Between 1896 and 1902 he became vice-chancellor of the University of London. He played the main role in the founding and direction of the British Institute of Preventive Medicine (today, The Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine) in Chelsea, modeled upon the Institut Pasteur in Paris, and served as a Carnegie trustee after 1901. In 1909 he was selected for the Privy Council.
  
  In 1884 Roscoe was knighted “in acknowledgment of his distinguished service on the Technical Education Commission”. He served as a Liberal Member of Parliament from 1885 until his defeat in the election of 1895.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Chemistry 1876
  • Spectrum Analysis 1878
  • Kurzes lehrbuch der chemie 1881
  • John Dalton And The Rise Of Modern Chemistry 1895
  • The life & experiences of Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe 1906

Views

Quotations: “Describing Robert Bunsen: as an investigator, he was great, as a teacher he was greater, as a man and friend he was greatest.”

"In the vestibule of the Manchester Town Hall are placed two life-sized marble statues facing each other. One of these is that of John Dalton… the other that of James Prescott Joule… Thus honor is done to Manchester’s two greatest sons - to Dalton, the founder of modern Chemistry and of the Atomic Theory, and the laws of chemical-combining proportions; to Joule, the founder of modern physics and the discoverer of the Law of Conservation of Energy. The one gave to the world the final and satisfactory proof… that in every kind of chemical change no loss of matter occurs; the other proved that in all the varied modes of physical change, no loss of energy takes place."

"We may regard [Scheele] not only as having given the first indication of the rich harvest to be reaped by the investigation of the compounds of organic chemistry but as having been the first to discover and make use of characteristic reactions by which closely allied substances can be detected and separated so that he must be considered one of the chief founders of analytical chemistry."

Membership

Roscoe was elected a member of the Royal Society in 1863 and he was one of the original members of the Society of Chemical Industry. He also became a member of the Chemical Society in 1855. He was elected a corresponding member of the Académie des Sciences and an honorary member of the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, the New York Academy of Sciences, the Chemical Society of Berlin, the Bunsen Gessellschaft, of the Verein für Naturwissenschaft of Brunswick, the Royal Society of Sciences of Göttingen, and the Royal Accademia Lincei of Rome, among others.

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  Royal Society , United Kingdom

  1863 - 1915

Connections

In 1863 Roscoe married Lucy Potter. They had a son, Edmund, and two daughters, Margaret and Dora. Edmund passed away when he was an undergraduate student at Magdalen College, Oxford.

Father:

Henry Roscoe

1800–1836

Mother:

Maria Roscoe (née Fletcher)

1798-1885

Cousin:

Stanley Jevons

Grandfather:

William Roscoe

8 March 1753 – 30 June 1831, an English historian, a leading abolitionist, art collector, M.P. (briefly), lawyer, banker, botanist and miscellaneous writer, perhaps best known today as an early abolitionist and for his poem for children The Butterfly's Ball, and the Grasshopper's Feast.

Sister:

Harriet Roscoe

born 1836

Wife:

Lucy Potter

Daughter:

Margaret Roscoe

Daughter:

Dora Roscoe

Son:

Edmund Roscoe

Friend:

Robert Wilhelm Bunsen

Henry Enfield Roscoe studied chemistry with Robert Wilhelm Bunsen at the University of Heidelberg.

teacher:

William Henry Balmain

1818–1880, the discoverer of Balmain's luminous paint and boron nitride, and from him Henry developed his interest for chemistry.

teacher:

Thomas Graham

The brilliant classes of Thomas Graham (1805–1869) impressed Henry so much that he decided to follow chemistry as a career.

mentor:

Robert Bunsen

In 1853, Roscoe received his Bachelor of Arts degree with Honors in chemistry and traveled to Heidelberg to work with Robert Wilhelm Bunsen (1811–1899). Bunsen taught Roscoe quantitative techniques and gas analysis and encouraged him in original research.

colleague:

William Dittmar

Professor William Dittmar (1833–1892) was a German-born scientist renowned as a chemical analyst. He was based largely in Scotland. He did much analytical work on the findings from the Challenger expedition.

colleague:

Alexander William Williamson

1 May 1824 – 6 May 1904, an English professor of chemistry of Scottish descent. He is best known today for the Williamson ether synthesis.

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography Volume 11
  1975