Professor Benjamin Gold Silliman

Interesting overview of his accomplishments in Mineralogy in early 1800s
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24137477
Correspondence as a window on the development of a discipline: Brongniart, Cleaveland, Silliman, and the maturation of mineralogy in the first decades of the 19th Century.
The 3 guys' profiles are here
Alexandre Brongniart
Prof. Parker Cleaveland
Professor Benjamin Gold Silliman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Silliman

Benjamin Silliman (8 August 1779 – 24 November 1864) was an early American chemist and science educator. He was one of the first American professors of science, at Yale College, the first person to distill petroleum in America, and a founder of the American Journal of Science, the oldest continuously published scientific journal in the United States.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/8719148

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Silliman was born in a tavern in North Stratford, now Trumbull, Connecticut, a few months after his mother, Mary (Fish) Silliman (widow of John Noyes), fled for her life from their Fairfield, Connecticut home to escape 2,000 invading British troops that burned Fairfield center to the ground. The British forces had taken his father, General Gold Selleck Silliman, prisoner in May of 1779.

Benjamin Silliman was a chemistry professor at Yale College and was considered "The Father of Science in America" and the founder of "The American Journal of Science". (bio by: Nareen, et al) 

married

1. Harriet Trumbull, daughter of Jonathan & Eunice (Backus) Tumbull, on September 17, 1809 in Lebanon, Conn.
2. Sarah Isabella McClellan Webb, widow of Isaac Webb, on March 19, 1842 in Woodstock, Conn. 

• from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Silliman

Benjamin Silliman (8 August 1779 – 24 November 1864) was an American chemist, one of the first American professors of science (at Yale University), and the first to distill petroleum.

Early life

Silliman was born in a tavern in North Stratford, now Trumbull, Connecticut, a few months after his mother, Mary (Fish) Silliman (widow of John Noyes), fled for her life from their Fairfield, Connecticut, home to escape two thousand invading British troops that burned Fairfield center to the ground. The British forces had taken his father, General Gold Selleck Silliman, prisoner in May 1779.

Education

He was educated at Yale, receiving an A.B. degree in 1796 and an A.M. in 1799. He studied law with Simeon Baldwin from 1798 to 1799 and became a tutor at Yale from 1799 to 1802. He was admitted to the bar in 1802. President Timothy Dwight IV of Yale proposed that he equip himself to teach in chemistry and natural history and accept a new professorship at the university. Silliman studied chemistry with Professor James Woodhouse at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and delivered his first lectures in chemistry at Yale in 1804. These lectures were the first science lectures ever given at Yale. In 1805, he traveled to Edinburgh for further study.

Career

Returning to New Haven, he studied its geology, and made a chemical analysis of the meteorite that fell near Weston, Connecticut, publishing the first scientific account of any American meteorite. He lectured publicly at New Haven in 1808 and came to discover many of the constituent elements of many minerals. Some time around 1818, Ephraim Lane took some samples of rocks he found at an area called Saganawamps, now a part of the Old Mine Park Archeological Site in Trumbull, Connecticut to Silliman for identification. Silliman reported, in his new American Journal of Science, that he had identified tungsten, tellurium, topaz and fluorite in the rocks. In 1837, the first (and at the time only) prismatic barite ore of tungsten in the United States was discovered at the mine. The mineral sillimanite was named after Silliman in 1850. Upon the founding of the Medical School, he also taught there as one of the founding faculty members. As professor emeritus, he delivered lectures at Yale on geology until 1855; in 1854, he became the first person to fractionate petroleum by distillation.

1807 meteor

At 6:30 in the morning of December 14, 1807, a blazing fireball about two-thirds the size of the moon, was seen traveling southwards by early risers in Vermont and Massachusetts. Three loud explosions were heard over the town of Weston in Fairfield County, Connecticut. Stone fragments fell in at least 6 places. The largest and only unbroken stone of the Weston fall, which weighed 36.5 pounds (16.5 kilograms), was found some days after Silliman and Kingsley had spent several fruitless hours hunting for it. The owner, a Trumbull farmer named Elijah Seeley, was urged to present it to Yale by local people who had met the professors during their investigation, but he insisted on putting it up for sale. It was purchased by Colonel George Gibbs for his large and famous collection of minerals; when the collection became the property of Yale in 1825, Silliman finally acquired this stone; the only specimen of the Weston meteorite that remains in the Yale Peabody Museum collection today.

Family

His first marriage was on 17 September 1809 to Harriet Trumbull, daughter of Connecticut governor Jonathan Trumbull, Jr., who was the son of Governor Jonathan Trumbull, Sr. of Connecticut, a hero of the American Revolution. Silliman and his wife had four children: one daughter married Professor Oliver P. Hubbard, another married Professor James Dwight Dana; and youngest daughter Julia married Edward Whiting Gilman, brother of Yale graduate and educator Daniel Coit Gilman. His son Benjamin Silliman Jr., also a professor of chemistry at Yale, wrote a report that convinced investors to back George Bissell's seminal search for oil. His second marriage was in 1851 to Mrs. Sarah Isabella (McClellan) Webb, daughter of John McClellan. Silliman died at New Haven and is buried in Grove Street Cemetery.

Legacy

Silliman deemed slavery an "enormous evil" but also favored colonization of free African Americans in Liberia, serving as a board member of the Connecticut colonization society between 1828 and 1835. He was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He founded and edited the American Journal of Science, and was appointed one of the corporate members of the National Academy of Sciences by the United States Congress.

A statue of Silliman in front of Yale's Sterling Chemistry Laboratory.

Silliman College, one of Yale's residential colleges, is named for him, as is the mineral Sillimanite.

Links

• http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=8719148 Benjamin Silliman was a chemistry professor at Yale College and was considered "The Father of Science in America" and the founder of "The American Journal of Science". He married (1) Harriet Trumbull, daughter of Jonathan & Eunice (Backus) Tumbull, on September 17, 1809 in Lebanon, Conn., and (2) Sarah Isabella McClellan Webb, widow of Isaac Webb, on March 19, 1842 in Woodstock, Conn. (bio by: [fg.cgi?page=mr&MRid=46613568" target="_blank Nareen, et al)]
• Reference: Find A Grave Memorial - SmartCopy: Jun 26 2018, 13:49:58 UTC

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HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF STONINGTON, county of New London, Connecticut, from its first settlement in 1649 to 1900, by Richard Anson Wheeler, New London, CT, 1900, p. 491