Benjamin Silliman

Benjamin Silliman 1779-1864, American chemist, geologist, and physicist, b. Trumbull, Conn., grad. Yale, 1796. In 1802 he was appointed first professor of chemistry and natural history at Yale; he traveled abroad and then returned to teach at Yale until 1853. He was noted as a teacher, as a popular lecturer on scientific subjects, and as a founder and editor (1818-46) of the American Journal of Science and Arts. He was the first president of the Association of American Geologists, which became (1848) the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a founding member of the National Academy of Sciences, and he helped to establish the medical school at Yale. His son, Benjamin Silliman, 1816-85, American chemist, b. New Haven, Conn., grad. Yale, 1837, was professor at Yale (1846-49) and then at the Univ. of Louisville (1849-54). In 1854 he returned to Yale, succeeding his father. The school of chemistry which he had established there (1847) later developed into the Sheffield Scientific School.

Silliman, Benjamin (1779–1864), educator, editor, scientist.Silliman was born in Trumbull, Connecticut, to a family of modest means. His father was a general during the Revolutionary War. Continuing a family tradition, Silliman studied law after his graduation from Yale College in 1796. The course of his life was radically altered in 1802, however, when Yale's president offered Silliman the new professorship of chemistry and natural history. Silliman accepted, but spent the next four years in various American and European cities learning the sciences he was to teach.

By the end of his active teaching career at Yale in 1853, Silliman was widely acknowledged as the patriarch of American science. He achieved this status not through his own largely descriptive work in chemistry, mineralogy, and geology, but through the achievements of his many students and through his American Journal of Science (1818). His students included Amos Eaton, Edward Hitchcock, James Dwight Dana, Benjamin Silliman Jr., Oliver P. Hubbard, and Charles Upham Shepard. The American Journal of Science, the nation's first general scientific periodical, offered a venue where Americans could read about the experiments and observations of their countrymen and publish their own work. Silliman also served as the hub of a wide system of correspondence that linked Americans interested in science to one another and to kindred spirits in Europe.

Originally chosen for the Yale faculty primarily on the strength of his Christian character, Silliman actively promoted the union of faith and science in his teaching and in the appendices he attached to his American editions of Robert Bakewell's Introduction to Geology. His characteristic blend of Genesis and geology made Silliman one of the most popular public lecturers of the Antebellum Era.
See also Henry, Joseph; Physical Sciences; Religion; Science: Revolutionary War to World War I; Science: Science and Religion.

Bibliography

John F. Fulton and and Elizabeth H. Thomson , Benjamin Silliman, 1779–1864: Pathfinder in American Science, 1947.
Chandos Michael Brown , Benjamin Silliman: A Life in the Young Republic, 1989.

Julie R. Newell