Charles Albert Browne

Charles Albert Browne (born August 12, 1870 in North Adams , Massachusetts , † February 3, 1947 in Washington, DC ) was an American agricultural chemist and historian of science.

Browne, son of a chemist, studied chemistry in the United States, came to the University of Göttingen in 1900 , studied agricultural chemistry and plant physiology and worked in the university laboratory for agricultural chemistry. In 1902 he received his doctorate from Bernhard Tollens with a dissertation on the chemical components of maize and elder marrow . He later worked as a chemist in the American sugar industry as director of the New York Sugar Research Laboratory, since 1927 in the US Department of Agriculture in Washington and there chief chemist of the US Bureau of Chemistry and Soils.

Browne has made a name for himself as a chemical historian. For the scientific history of agriculture, its contributions to the development of agricultural chemistry are of particular importance. He dedicated several works to Justus von Liebig's life's work . Browne's most important work is his study A Source Book of Agricultural Chemistry, published in 1944 . In this biographically conceived source documentation, he also presented the scientific achievements of several German agricultural scientists.

In 1944, at their request, he began to write the history of the American Chemical Society, which was continued after his death by Mary Elvira Weeks (he had included it a few months before his death when he had completed nine chapters) and was published in 1952.

Fonts (selection)

• Liebig and after Liebig. A Century of Progress in Agricultural Chemistry . Publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science No. 16. Washington, DC 1942. - (This document contains two contributions by Browne on Justus von Liebig).
• A Source Book of Agricultural Chemistry . Waltham, Mass., USA 1944 = Chronica Botanica Vol. 8, No. 1.
• with Mary Elvira Weeks: A History of the American Chemical Society — Seventy-five Eventful Years , Washington DC: American Chemical Society 1952

literature

• Herbert S. Klickstein and Henry M. Leicester: Charles Albert Browne as an historian of chemistry . In: Journal of Chemical Education Vol. 25, 1948, pp. 315-317 et al. 343 (with a comprehensive bibliography of his writings).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Biography of Mary Elvira Weeks, pdf , ACS