Thomas Cooper (chemist)

Thomas Cooper

Thomas Cooper (born October 22, 1759 in London , † May 11, 1839 in Columbia ) was an English-American chemist, lawyer, economist and politician.

Life

Cooper studied at Oxford without a degree, then completed a legal training at the Inner Temple in London and during this time also turned to chemistry and calico printing . At the same time he was politically active in the 1790s for more religious freedom and against the slave trade. He was a founding member of the Manchester Constitutional Society and, like Joseph Priestley, was politically considered a radical. In 1792 he traveled to Paris with James Watt junior (the son of James Watt ) and there made special contacts with the Jacobins (but also visited Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier ). This made him the target of attacks in England by Edmund Burke , who was known as a sharp opponent of the French Revolution in England. Disaffected by the reign of terror in France and exposed to increasing political attacks in England, he went to the USA with Priestley in 1794.

He practiced as a lawyer in Northumberland County , Pennsylvania and was also politically active here. Cooper supported the Republican Democratic Party of Thomas Jefferson and agitated against restrictions on the freedom of the press for foreigners ( Alien and Sedition Acts ) by President John Adams , and in 1799 he himself was indicted by this law after a sharp pamphlet against John Adams. He was a Land Commissioner and traveling judge, but lost the post in 1811 after falling out with his party. When Priestley died (1804), he wrote a scientific obituary and rearranged his estate, which revived his interest in chemistry.

Through Thomas Jefferson's mediation, he became a professor of law and science at the University of Virginia , but soon lost the professorship because he was suspicious of church circles like Priestley as a materialist. 1811 to 1814 he was professor of chemistry at Dickinson College in Carlisle (Pennsylvania) and 1818/19 at the University of Pennsylvania . He also applied for a professorship in chemistry at the Medical College but was beaten by a competitor who skipped exams. In 1819 he became a professor of chemistry (and later economics) at South Carolina College (later the University of South Carolina). From 1821 to 1833 he was its president, but then had to resign again because of attacks by conservative religious circles after he initially fended off their attacks. He was popular with his students and they sheltered him from attack towards the end of his presidency. In 1834 he also resigned from his professorship. During his time as president, he also initiated the establishment of a medical college that was established in Charleston.

He published on legal subjects, including a translation of Justinian I's legal compilation (1812). Most recently, he worked on behalf of the governor from 1835 on a multi-volume collection and edition of the laws of South Carolina (Statues at Large), which David James McCord (1797–1855) completed after his death . He edited 5 volumes himself, 5 his successor.

Cooper was also active in the asylum for the mentally ill and translated related writings by the French doctor François Broussais with his own essays.

As a politician he was known in the 1820s as a representative of the idea of ​​a secession of the South from the USA, which might be necessary for economic reasons (dispute over foreign trade tariffs). This made him a forerunner of John C. Calhoun's nullification doctrine . While he was still an opponent of the slave trade in England, he appeared in the southern states as an advocate of slavery, which he considered necessary for the cultivation of the country. In addition to Thomas Jefferson, James Madison was one of his friends.

Chemist

Cooper is also known as a chemist. In France, he learned about the process of extracting chlorine from table salt and, on his return, introduced chlorine bleaching of textiles in Manchester. He also used the forerunners of the autoclaves (he packed the clothes with chlorine and hypochlorite in closed barrels, in which the chemical-producing reaction took place and thus also generated increased pressure). He found a new method for obtaining chlorine: he converted red lead oxide with table salt and sulfuric acid, whereby the lead was reused (instead of the conversion of manganese dioxide with hydrochloric acid, which was customary at that time by Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Walter Weldon ). In 1810 he was the first chemist in the USA to prepare pure potassium ( Humphry Davy had previously succeeded in doing this in England ) by heating potash with iron in a steel pipe. In his lectures he also taught mineralogy and geology. He built up a mineralogical collection at the university, which later became an important impetus for the Geological Survey. He proclaimed that the Old Testament was not a reliable source as to the age of the earth.

In the USA he introduced an improved chemistry course at the university and had many students who also worked as chemists in the north of the USA. Cooper published English textbooks of chemistry for teaching in the United States such as A system of chemistry by Thomas Thomson (chemist) , which made the laws of John Dalton known in the United States (such as the law of multiple proportions ), and the Conversations on Chemistry by Jane Marcet . In his Introductory Lecture and in his Discourse on the connection between chemistry and medicine , he discussed the connection between medicine and chemistry, describing chemistry as being in the childhood of a Hercules .

In 1813 he analyzed the rockets used by the British in the war against the USA (recovered in Havre-le-Grace), which made their reconstruction possible.

In 1802 he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society .

Fonts

• Letters on the Slave-Trade, London, 1787
• Tracts, Ethical, Theological, and Political, 1790
• Information concerning America, 1790
• Political Essays, Northumberland, Pennsylvania 1799
• Account of the Trial of Thomas Cooper, of Northumberland, Philadelphia, 1800
• The Bankrupt Law of America Compared with that of England, 1801
• An English Version of the Institutions of Justinian, 1812
• A practical treatise on dyeing and Callicoe printing, Philadelphia 1815
• Tracts on Medical Jurisprudence, 1819
• Lectures on the Elements of Political Economy, Charleston, 1826, 2nd edition 1830, Reprint New York 1971
• A Treatise on the Law of Libel and the Liberty of the Press, 1830
• Introductory Lectures on Chemistry, 1820
• The Introductory Lecture (1811) and A Discourse on the connection between chemistry and medicine (1818), Arno Press 1980
• Editor of François Broussais: On irritation and insanity, 1831 (with Cooper's own essays: The Scripture Doctrine of Materialism, View of the Metaphysical and Physiological Arguments in favor of Materialism, Outline of the Doctrine of the Association of Ideas)

From 1812 to 1814 he was editor of two of the five volumes of the Emporium of Arts and Sciences in Philadelphia , in which particularly application-oriented scientific articles were often published from abroad. He had to stop showing after his employees had to do their military service.

literature

• Winfried R. Pötsch (lead), Annelore Fischer, Wolfgang Müller: Lexicon of important chemists , Harri Deutsch 1989, p. 93
• Dumas Malone: ​​The public life of Thomas Cooper 1783-1839, Yale University Press 1926
• Seymour S. Cohen : Thomas Cooper, in Marc Rothenberg (Ed.), History of Science in the United States. An Encyclopedia, Garland Publ. 2001

Web links

• Encyclopedia Britannica 1911

Individual evidence

1. ^ Member History: Thomas Cooper. American Philosophical Society, accessed June 27, 2018 .