Name Henry Bolton Died November 19, 1903 | Education Columbia University Main interests Chemistry | |
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Major works Catalogue of Scientific and Technical Periodicals, 1665-1895 Books The Counting‑out Rhymes, Evolution of the Thermom, The follies of science at the cou, Notes on the Early Literature, Catalogue of Scientific and Tech | ||
Henry Carrington Bolton (1843–1903) was a chemist and bibliographer of science.
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Biography
He graduated from Columbia in 1862, and then studied chemistry with Jean Baptiste André Dumas and Charles Adolphe Wurtz in Paris; with Robert Bunsen, Hermann Kopp, and Gustav Kirchhoff at Heidelberg; with Friedrich Wöhler at Göttingen; and with August Wilhelm von Hofmann in Berlin, and received a D. Phil. at Göttingen in 1866, for his work called “On the Fluorine Compounds of Uranium”.
After his graduation, he spent some years in travel. From 1872 until 1877, he was assistant in quantitative analysis in the Columbia School of Mines. In 1874 he was appointed professor of chemistry in the Woman's Medical College of the New York Infirmary. He resigned in 1877, when he became professor of chemistry and natural science in Trinity College. The celebration of the centennial of chemistry at Northumberland, Pennsylvania, the home of Joseph Priestley, who discovered oxygen in 1774, was suggested and brought about by Bolton.
Among his investigations, that of the action of organic acids on minerals is perhaps the most important, but most of his work was literary, and his private collection of early chemical books was unsurpassed in the United States. Bolton published large bibliographies of chemistry and later of all scientific periodicals which are still used. He included alchemy in the chemistry listings and emphasized the continuity of the transition. He was a member of many scientific societies, perhaps more than any contemporary.
The Chemical Heritage Foundation runs the Bolton Society, which is named for H.C. Bolton, to support "printed materials devoted to chemistry and related sciences" and its Othmer Library of Chemical History in particular.