Background
Jacob Green was born on July 26, 1790, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was the son of Ashbel Green, prominent Presbyterian clergyman and eighth president of Princeton University.
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, United States
Jacob received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Pennsylvania in 1807.
Botanist chemist educator scientist writer
Jacob Green was born on July 26, 1790, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was the son of Ashbel Green, prominent Presbyterian clergyman and eighth president of Princeton University.
Jacob received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Pennsylvania in 1807. He also studied medicine and law. Yale University gave Green an honorary Master of Arts in 1827.
After graduation Green sold books in Albany, New York, for a few years, and was admitted to the New York bar. In 1816 he moved to Princeton, New Jersey, to live with his father and study theology. He was sidetracked to science when the professor of natural philosophy, Henry Vethake, hired him as an assistant. In 1818 he was elected to a newly created professorship of chemistry, experimental philosophy, and natural history in Princeton, and held this professorship until it was abolished in 1822.
Green then moved to Philadelphia, delivered a course of public lectures on chemistry, and joined several physicians in founding Jefferson Medical College. He was a professor of chemistry there from 1825 until 1841. During several summers he traveled to Jefferson College (now Washington and Jefferson College) and to Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania, to teach chemistry.
In 1828 Green visited Europe and later published his impressions in Notes of a Traveller. He met Michael Faraday, John Dalton, and other scientists but, to his disappointment, not Humphry Davy, who was abroad. In 1830 he published an edition of Davy’s Consolations in Travel.
Green moved from one science to another, depending upon the circumstances of his life. At the age of nineteen, he and his friend Erskine Hazard published An Epitome of Electricity & Galvanism. Learning botany largely by independent study, he wrote about plants of New York. Inspired by the skies during evening strolls, he wrote a popular book, Astronomical Recreations. As a teacher of chemistry, he published three texts.
Late in his life Green married and was the father of two children.