The Right Honourable Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe P.C., D.C.L., F.R.S. T. E. Thorpe
modern development of the steam-engine depends, and though he failed for want of constructive skill, he pointed the way which engineers have since followed with conspicuous success.
In his second year in the Birkbeck Laboratory Roscoe became Williamson’s private assistant, and took part in his researches, and when Graham accepted the Mastership of the Mint, and Williamson succeeded to the chair at University College, Roscoe was made lecture assistant. Williamson had the idea at that time of publishing an abridged translation of Gerhardt’s Chimie Organique, for the benefit of English students, which Roscoe was to prepare, but nothing came of the project.
Graham, who had been commissioned to send out an assayer to the Sydney Mint, offered Roscoe the position. The salary was very tempting, but as his mother and sister had no desire to go to Australia, the offer was declined, and his cousin Stanley Jevons, who had passed through the Birkbeck Laboratory, was sent in his stead.
It was in recognition of Roscoe’s association with Williamson that nearly forty years afterwards he was deputed, on behalf of the subscribers, to present the portrait of his master which now hangs in University College.
Roscoe took his degree of Bachelor of Arts in the University of London, with Honours in chemistry, in 1853, and as he was now more than ever determined to follow a career of science, he decided to enlarge his experience by a course of study in a continental laboratory, as was then the usual custom. Of the great leaders of British chemical science in the first half of the nineteenth century—Dalton, Thomson, Davy, Faraday, Graham—only Thomson and Graham, and to a limited extent Dalton, were in a position to exert any influence as teachers, and even in their case there was little provision of instruction in practical chemistry.
The older English universities had practically nothing of the kind; their disciplines offered no encouragement to the study of chemical science. The university which prides itself on having afforded a home to Boyle extended no opportunity to a man to make any research unless he found his own laboratory and apparatus. Dr. Liveing started the first laboratory for students in Cambridge at his own expense in 1852, hiring a cottage in the town for the purpose. On the other hand, at that time, thanks to the influence of the French school of chemists; of Berzelius in Sweden; Liebig, Wöhler, Mitscherlich, and the two Roses in Germany, systematic instruction in chemistry was being actively pursued on the Continent, and nearly every leading University abroad could show a more or less well-equipped laboratory, and a body more or less large of eager and enthusiastic investigators. Accordingly, at this period, aspirants for chemical fame in this country naturally turned to one or other of the chemical schools in France or Germany to seek there what they were unable to find at home.
Roscoe elected to go to Bunsen, who had recently been called from Breslau to Heidelberg in succession to Leopold Gmelin, the author of the well-known “Handbuch.” Bunsen had already won for himself a European reputation by his masterly investigation of the cacodyl compounds, by the improvements he had effected in gasometric methods, by his investigations on the chemistry of the blast-furnace, his invention of the carbon-zinc battery and photometer, and his inquiries into the chemical aspects of the volcanic and pseudo-volcanic phenomena of Iceland.
It is perhaps idle to speculate why Roscoe should have left Williamson at the most fruitful period of his career, and when, under his stimulus, organic chemistry was apparently about to enter upon a great development in this country. But the probability is that then, as afterwards, the problems of organic chemistry and the purely speculative aspects of the science had few attractions for him, and that he saw in the many-sided nature of Bunsen’s work, in its eminently practical character, and the precision of its quantitative methods, much that appealed to his inclination towards the operative, and especially the determinative side of chemistry, for Bunsen was pre-eminently a master of manipulation, as every one who aspired to a professional career in chemistry and who hoped to direct a chemical laboratory fully recognized.
Roscoe, with his mother and sister, who elected to keep house for him, reached Heidelberg in the autumn of 1853 with an introduction to von Mohl, the Professor of International Law, with whose family they became well acquainted. One of the daughters, Anna von Mohl, was the second wife of Helmholtz. By von Mohl he was made known to Bunsen.
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