Remsen, Ira

REMSEN, IRA

(b. New York, N.Y., 10 February 1846; d. Carmel, California, 4 March 1927)

chemistry, education.

Remsen was educated in the New York public schools and, at the age of fourteen, entered the Free Academy (later the College of the City of New York). He did not complete the four-year course there but, at the urging of his father, James Vanderbilt Remsen, became an apprentice to a doctor who taught in a homeopathic medical school. Remsen was dismayed at the inadequacy of the instruction that he was offered and prevailed upon his father to permit him to enroll in the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, from which he received the M.D. in 1867. Having completed his medical studies and reached his majority, Remsen decided to study chemistry—to which he had been attracted by the lectures of R.O. Doremus at the Cooper Union—and went to Munich to pursue that subject under Liebig. By that time, however, Liebig was no longer giving laboratory instruction, although Remsen was able to attend some of his lectures. Remsen therefore studied for a year with Jacob Volhard then, with Volhard’s help, transferred in the autumn of 1867 to the University of Göttingen, where he worked with Rudolph Fittig. He was granted the Ph.D. in 1870 for his research on the structure of piperic and piperonylic acids.

When Fittig went to Tübingen as professor of chemistry later in 1870, he took Remsen with him as his laboratory and lecture assistant. Remsen held this post for two years, during which he worked independently on the oxidation of ortho- and parasulfotoluene. His investigations led him to Remsen’s law that groups attached to the benzene ring in the ortho position protect paramethyl, paraethyl, and parapropyl groups from oxidation by nitric or chromic acid.

In 1872 Remsen returned to New York to seek an academic appointment. After some months, during which he translated Fittig’s edition of Wöhler’s Organic Chemistry, he was named professor of chemistry and physics at Williams College. He remained there for four years, performing his own laboratory research, although he was unable to institute a course of laboratory work for his students. In 1876, while still at Williams, he published his own Principles of Theoretical Chemistry, an influential text that emphasized Cannizzaro’s determination of molecular weights through Avogadro’s hypothesis.

Remsen’s growing reputation attracted the attention of Daniel Coit Gilman, first president of the new Johns Hopkins University, and in 1876 Remsen accepted Gilman’s offer of a professorship of chemistry. At Johns Hopkins, Remsen was able to introduce many of the teaching methods—especially the integration of laboratory research—with which he had become acquainted in Germany, and these practices had a profound influence on the teaching of chemistry in the United States, particularly at the graduate level, until World War II. Remsen attracted a large number of students from both the United States and Europe during his teaching career.

In 1879 Remsen invited Constantine Fahlberg, who had taken the Ph.D. at Leipzig, to continue the study of the oxidation of substituted benzene rings. Remsen had shown that ortho groups could be oxidized by potassium permanganate, and Fahlberg, working in Remsen’s laboratory and at Remsen’s suggestion, oxidized onhotoluene sulfamide by potassium permanganate to produce orthobenzoyl sulfimide. Fahlberg found the compound, later named saccharin, to be intensely sweet, and with the help of A. List patented the process for commercial manufacture. Although Remsen apparently felt some initial grievance about Fahlberg’s behavior, he mastered his ill will and in 1907 acted impartially as head of the board appointed by Theodore Roosevelt to determine whether sodium benzoate (used as a food preservative) and saccharin were injurious to health.

Remsen founded, in 1879, the American Chemical Journal, the first continuing periodical devoted to American chemical research. He served as its chief editor until 1911, when it was incorporated into the Journal of the American Chemical Society. In 1887 he became secretary to the academic council of Johns Hopkins, and in 1901 he succeeded Gilman as president of the university. Despite the demands of his administrative duties, he remained as head of the chemistry laboratory until 1908. He retired as professor emeritus and president emeritus in 1913; he had previously refused to work for private firms (although he had taken active part in work for municipalities, notably Boston and Baltimore) but was then retained by Standard Oil as a laboratory consultant until his death in 1927. He was survived by his wife, Elizabeth Mallory Remsen, whom he had married in 1875, and by two sons; his ashes were placed in Remsen Hall at Johns Hopkins University.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. The Milton S. Eisenhower Library of Johns Hopkins University has more than 1,000 MS items by or related to Remsen. It also has several scrapbooks, including one entitled “Sewage Problems in Baltimore (1905–1912)” and another covering the resignation of Gilman from the university presidency and the subsequent installation of Remsen. The John Work Garrett Library at Johns Hopkins has a collection of Remsen’s medals and family memorabilia. MS material, chiefly letters, are scattered in other library collections, including the Edgar Fahs Smith collection at the University of Pennsylvania and the Lyman Churchill Newell collection in the chemistry department at Boston University, Remsen descendants hold others. E. Emmett Reid, formerly professor of organic chemistry at Johns Hopkins, assembled a scrapbook of personal recollections of Remsen recorded by the latter’s students.

II. Secondary Literature. The National Academy of Sciences devoted Biographical Memoirs. National Academy of Sciences, 14 (1932), 207–257, to Remsen. In that compilation W. A. Noyes and J. F. Norris assembled a biography from their papers in Science, 66 (1927), 243–246; Journal of the Chemical Society (1927), 3182–3189; and Journal of the American Chemical Society. Proceedings (1928), 67–79. A bibliography of papers published by Remsen and by his students, of Remsen’s books, and of his addresses is repro. on 230–240 from Journal of the American Chemical Society, 50 (1928), 80.

Remsen’s biography in Dictionary of American Biography, XV, 500–502, is by W. A. Noyes. Frederick H. Getman, Life of Ira Remsen (Easton, Pa., 1940), synthesizes all of the above material and adds Getman’s own recollections of Remsen. The appendix lists some of Remsen’s publications and is an abridgment of that in Journal of the American Chemical Society (1928) listed above. A brief biography of Remsen, by Aaron Ihde, is in E. Farber, Great Chemists (New York, 1961), 819–822. A summary of documents concerning Remsen in government archives may be found in Current Literature, 52 (1912), 304–305.

J. Z. Fullmer