Samuel Guthrie was an American chemist and physician, known as the inventor and manufacturer of an effective priming powder, called the “percussion pill, ” and the punch lock for exploding it, which together replaced the flash-in-the-pan type of powder and made the old-fashioned flint-lock musket obsolete.
Background
Samuel Guthrie was born in Brimfield, Massachusetts, United States in 1782.
He descended from John Guthrie, an emigrant from Edinburgh, Scotland, who died in Litchfield County, Connecticut, in 1730, the oldest son of Samuel and Sarah Guthrie.
Education
Samuel Guthrie had little formal education.
Besides some years of desultory study of medicine with his father, who was a physician, he took only two courses of lectures, one at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, in 1810-11, and the other at the University of Pennsylvania in 1815.
Career
Samuel Guthrie must have been in practice before the War of 1812. By his father’s will he received “one dollar, to be paid when called for, ” the five volumes of Benjamin Rush’s Enquiries, and one set of silver catheters.
A significant year in his life was 1817, when he moved, with his wife and three children, from Sherburne, New York, which had been their home for some years, to Sacketts Harbor, New York. Here he lived about thirty years. Northern New York at that time was nearly a wilderness, and Guthrie, being a man of ingenuity, self-reliance, and versatility, plunged into a pioneer’s life.
In addition to clearing the land, constructing a house, and raising crops, he became a practical chemist.
He had a laboratory near his house where he performed experiments, and a mill about a mile away where he manufactured for many years large quantities of this powder and other explosives.
In 1830 he devised a process for the rapid conversion of potato starch into molasses, and in July 1831 sent Benjamin Silliman a description of his process together with a sample of the product. To Silliman he also sent samples of crystallized potassium chlorate, of numerous varieties of powder, of oil of turpentine, and of “spirituous solution of chloric ether. ”
His letters describing these chemical substances were published with editorial comment in the American Journal of Science during 1832 and reprinted, probably in the same year, as The Complete Writings of Samuel Guthrie.
The “chloric ether” made by Guthrie in 1831 by distilling chloride of lime with alcohol in a copper still proved to be chloroform, and the discovery antedated slightly the independent discoveries of the same compound made at practically the same time by Soubeiran in France and Liebig in Germany.
Samuel Guthrie died in 1848 at Sacketts Harbor, in the house where he had lived for thirty years.
His immediate neighbors, besides calling upon “the doctor” for aid in sickness, knew him as a quiet, taciturn man, who made the best vinegar in the vicinity, distilled a good brand of alcohol, and performed mysterious — often astounding experiments with apparatus fabricated by himself.
Connections
Guthrie married Sybil Sexton in 1804. The eldest of their four children, Alfred, removed to Chicago where he attained some distinction as an engineer; the second son, Edwin, captain of a company of Iowa volunteers, was killed in the Mexican War.