1. Benjamin Silliman was an American chemist and science educator.
16 Facts About Benjamin Silliman
1. 2.
Benjamin Silliman was one of the first American professors of science, the first science professor at Yale, and the first person to use the process of fractional distillation in America.
3.
Benjamin Silliman was a founder of the American Journal of Science, the oldest continuously published scientific journal in the United States.
4.
Benjamin Silliman studied law with Simeon Baldwin from 1798 to 1799 and became a tutor at Yale from 1799 to 1802.
5.
Benjamin Silliman, who had never studied chemistry, prepared for the job by studying chemistry with Professor James Woodhouse at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
6.
Benjamin Silliman lectured publicly at New Haven in 1808 and came to discover many of the constituent elements of many minerals.
7.
Benjamin Silliman reported in his new American Journal of Science, a publication covering all the natural sciences but with an emphasis on geology, that he had identified tungsten, tellurium, topaz and fluorite in the rocks.
8.
Benjamin Silliman played a major role in the discoveries of the first articulated fossil fishes found in the United States, which he discovered in Newark Supergroup deposits near Connecticut, and were later described as the genera Redfieldius and Semionotus.
9.
Benjamin Silliman was an early supporter of coeducation in the Ivy League.
10.
Benjamin Silliman's efforts convinced Frederick Barnard, later president of Columbia College, that women ought to be admitted as students.
11.
In 1864 Benjamin Silliman noted oil seeps in the Ojai, California, area.
12.
Benjamin Silliman died at New Haven in 1864 and is buried in Grove Street Cemetery.
13.
Benjamin Silliman favored colonization of free African Americans in Liberia, serving as a board member of the Connecticut Colonization Society between 1828 and 1835.
14.
Benjamin Silliman was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1813, and an Associate Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1815.
15.
Benjamin Silliman 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.
16.
Benjamin Silliman was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.