Samuel Cox Hooker was born on April 19, 1864 in Brenchley, Kent, England. He was the second of four children, all of whom he survived. His father, John Marshall Hooker, an architect, was descended from a long line of Brenchley country gentlemen; his mother, Ellen Cox, was the daughter of Samuel Cox, who owned sugar plantations in Demerara, British Guiana.
Hooker's early schooling was obtained chiefly at Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, Sevenoaks, where he showed an early aptitude for photography and other chemical pursuits. In 1881 he entered the Government Science School at South Kensington, London, where under F. R. Japp he made advancement and was awarded a prize for distinction in chemistry. In 1884 he continued his chemical studies at the University of Munich, where he obtained the degree of Ph. D. within one year by a brilliant research upon the composition and derivatives of retene, a compound found in the tar of coniferous trees.
Hooker reached the conclusion that America offered the best opportunities for a chemical career, and obtained in 1885 a position as chief chemist with the Franklin Sugar Refining Company of Philadelphia. In the intervals of his refinery duties he wrote an important sanitary report on the pollution of the Philadelphia water supply and began a series of organic chemical researches on the composition of lapachol, a yellow crystalline substance occurring in Bethabarra wood. The latter investigation was opening a vast field of possibilities when the new technological duties arising from the amalgamation of his company's business with the American Sugar Refining Company obliged him to postpone all further organic chemical research.
When the American Sugar Refining Company acquired a controlling interest in many western beet-sugar factories, Hooker was assigned the task of organizing these establishments on a more efficient basis. Later he was a director of the Great Western Sugar Company from 1909 to 1913.
In 1909 he was appointed to the board of directors of the American Sugar Refining Company, and shortly thereafter he moved his home to Brooklyn, New York, where he spent the remainder of his life. In his refinery work he displayed the same ability in selecting men for high positions and in directing policies that he had shown in his beet-sugar operations.
Shaping his career according to an early scheme, Hooker retired from business in 1915 in order to take up several avocational activities in which he was long interested. The chief of these was the completion of the lapachol investigation which he had laid aside over twenty years before. This long research, conducted in a private laboratory, was completed only a short time before his death. His later papers and notes, edited by Louis F. Fieser, were posthumously published in a series of eleven articles in the Journal of the American Chemical Society for July 1936. These, with eleven of Hooker's earlier papers, were published, with a biography, as a memorial volume in 1936, under the title The Constitution and Properties of Lapachol, Lomatiol, and other Hydroxynaphthoquinone Derivatives.
Another of Hooker's interests was the enlargement of his scientific library, which at the time of his death was one of the most complete chemical libraries in the world. It comprised over 21, 000 volumes and was especially rich in sets of rare journals. It was acquired by Central College, Fayette, Missouri, where, with the reconstructed laboratory and study, it constitutes a permanent memorial to Hooker.
He died, at the age of seventy-one, survived by his wife and their four children.
Hooker was a member of several technical societies, at home and abroad, and served for a time as chairman of the library committee of the Chemists' Club of New York.
Hooker's success in many diverse fields was in part due to his resolute will and his ability to concentrate on the matter at hand. Because of his high stature (he was six feet six inches tall) and rather austere manner, strangers sometimes felt overawed in his presence, but beneath this cloak of reserve there was tenderness and candor. Honors meant little to him.
In 1887 Hooker married Mary Elizabeth Owens of Cincinnati, Ohio, whom he first met as a fellow student of chemistry at South Kensington. They had four children: Ellen, Mary Alice, William Henry, and Samuel Cox Jr.
