Robert Hare (chemist)

Robert Hare

Robert Hare (born January 17, 1781 Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , † May 15, 1858 ibid) was an American chemist .

Life

Hare is the son of Robert Hare, who emigrated from England, and Margaret Willing, a cousin of Thomas Willing , a politician and head of the Bank of North America . His father had started a large brewery in Philadelphia. Hare helped in the brewery in his youth, but did not attend regular school. Because of his interest in science, he attended some courses with James Woodhouse at the Academy of the University of Pennsylvania . After the death of James Woodhouse, he wanted to take over his chair, but this was rejected due to the lack of a doctorate. From 1810 to 1812 he taught at the medical faculty at the newly created chair for natural philosophy . Since he could only win a few students for the optional lectures, this was economically of no interest to him and after the death of his father he continued to run the brewery he had inherited, with which he got into economic difficulties as a result of the war in 1812 . In 1818 he was offered a position as professor of natural philosophy at William and Mary College and later the same year a position as professor of chemistry at the medical school. In 1824, Hare was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He taught chemistry until 1847. In 1854 he turned to spiritism and wrote several books about it that made him known as a spiritualist in the United States.

Hare was married to Harriett Clark and the couple had six children.

Scientific successes

Shortly after 1800 and around the same time as Edward Daniel Clarke from Cambridge, Hare researched and developed the cutting torch powered by oxygen and hydrogen , with which it was also possible for him to melt platinum. In 1802 he wrote a short memoir on the Supply and Application of the Blow-Pipe (Philadelphia: Chemical Society), which made him internationally known through its publication in the renowned English Philosophical Magazine and the French Annales de Chimie . Because of his invention of the cutting torch, he was accepted into the American Philosophical Society in 1803 . He received an honorary doctorate in medicine from Yale University in 1806 and another honorary doctorate from Harvard University in 1816 . For the invention of the cutting torch he received the first Rumford Prize in 1839 . In the 1820s he developed the deflagrator , a form of galvanic cell with particularly large electrodes. He did research in the field of salts.

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1. ↑ ^{a b} The Hebrew University of Jerusalem: The Institute of Chemistry ( Memento of the original from December 5, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
2. ↑ ^{a b} Bartleby.com: Hare, Robert ( Memento of April 16, 2009 in the Internet Archive )

Web links

• famousamericans.net: Robert Hare (engl.)