The German Model of Chemical Education in America: Ira Remsen at Johns Hopkins (1876–1913)

Abstract

THE foundation of The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1876 may not rank in the popular imagination with those other centenary events we celebrate this year-the centennial of the founding of the American Chemical Society and the bicentennial of the declared independence of the United States. Nevertheless it \vas a highly significant event in the history of American higher education and the accidental conjunction of dates affords us an opportunity to re-examine an important episode in the development of American chemical education and research. Hopkins was the first American University to place research at the centre of its educational mission, and to concentrate its efforts on the training and formation of Ph.D.'s, in part, after the model of the German universities. I ts example and success spawned the whole endeavour of modern American graduate and post-graduate education.l It is therefore appropriate at this time to examine the influence which Ira Remsen (1846-1927), Hopkins' first professor of chemistry and second President of the University, had in the development of American chemical education. Remsen, perhaps more self-consciously than any other member of Hopkins' first faculty, sought to model his department on the schools of German chemistry in which he was trained.2 There can be little doubt about the impact that Remsen and his department had on American chemistry. As with the other departnlents at Hopkins, this was most manifest in the staffing of America's colleges and universities through the first quarter of the twentieth century. In 1925, the year before Remsen's death, eighty-four Ph.D.'s of the department he founded held full professorships in colleges and universities, and forty of these were heads of departments.3 His school was also the first to have a systematically organized programme of research; and the journal Remsen founded and edited, the A1nerican Chel1'tical Journal (1879-1913) was clearly the nation's premier research journal during the first two decades of its existence, and set the standards 'which the Journal of the Al1terican Chemical Society emulated and surpassed in the twentieth century. Remsen \vas President of the American Chemical Society in 1902, recipient of the Society's J. Willard Gibbs' medal in 1914, its Joseph Priestley medal in 1923; and was President of the Society of Chemistry and Industry in 1910. But as soon as one penetrates behind the facts and figures of Remsen's achievement a number of ambiguities emerge which make it difficult to render a clear-cut verdict on his career. For instance, although heralded as the founder of American chemical research, his students remembered him best as a skilled lecturer and influential teacher, not as a dynamic director of research.4 His high school and college textbooks of chemistry wielded far greater influence on two generations of American chemists than did any piece of research he accomplished or directed.5 And finally, for a man who produced so many of America's first generation of research-trained chemists, he played a relatively minor role in the organizational development of the American chemical profession. In fact his presidential