Henry Carrington Bolton | |
|---|---|
 Engraving of head view of Henry Carrington Bolton, 1893 or 1900 | |
| Born | 29 January 1843[1] New York City[2] |
| Died | November 19, 1903 (aged 60) |
| Academic work | |
| Main interests | Chemistry; Scientific bibliography |
| Notable works | Catalogue of Scientific and Technical Periodicals, 1665-1895 |
Henry Carrington Bolton (1843–1903) was an American chemist and bibliographer of science.
He graduated from Columbia in 1862,[3] and then studied chemistry with Jean Baptiste André Dumas and Charles Adolphe Wurtz in Paris; with Robert Bunsen, Hermann Kopp, and Gustav Kirchhoff at Heidelberg; with Friedrich Wöhler at Göttingen; and with August Wilhelm von Hofmann in Berlin, and received a D. Phil. at Göttingen in 1866, for his work called "On the Fluorine Compounds of Uranium".[2]
After his graduation, he spent some years in travel. From 1872 until 1877, he was assistant in quantitative analysis in the Columbia School of Mines. In 1874 he was appointed professor of chemistry in the Woman's Medical College of the New York Infirmary. He resigned in 1877, when he became professor of chemistry and natural science in Trinity College. The celebration of the centennial of chemistry at Northumberland, Pennsylvania, the home of Joseph Priestley, who discovered oxygen in 1774, was suggested and brought about by Bolton.[3]
Among his investigations, that of the action of organic acids on minerals is perhaps the most important, but most of his work was literary, and his private collection of early chemical books was unsurpassed in the United States.[3] Bolton published large bibliographies of chemistry and later of all scientific periodicals which are still used. He included alchemy in the chemistry listings and emphasized the continuity of the transition. He was a member of many scientific societies, perhaps more than any contemporary.[1]
The Science History Institute hosts the Bolton Society, which is named for H.C. Bolton, to support "printed materials devoted to chemistry and related sciences" and to support its Othmer Library of Chemical History.[4]
James Keir Priestley.
