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The Department of Chemistry at the University of Oxford, England, is a large university chemistry department.
Contents
Overview
The department has several laboratories in the Science Area at Oxford:
Origins
Chemistry has a long history at Oxford University. The early pioneer of chemistry Robert Boyle and his assistant Robert Hooke began working in Oxford in the mid-seventeenth century. A chemistry laboratory was built in the basement of the Old Ashmolean Building in 1683, which was used until 1860. Chemical research was also conducted in laboratories set up in individual colleges – Christ Church (1767), Magdalen (Daubeny Laboratory, 1848), Balliol (1853, later joined with Trinity to become the Balliol-Trinity Laboratories), Queen's (1900), and Jesus (1907).
Chemistry was first recognized as a separate discipline at Oxford with the building of a laboratory attached to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, opening in 1860. The laboratory is a small octagonal structure to the right of the museum, built in stone in the Victorian Gothic style. The design was based on the Abbot's Kitchen at Glastonbury and it adopted the same name despite being a laboratory. The building was one of the first ever purpose-built chemical laboratories anywhere and was extended in 1878.