Life and Work
Edgar Fahs Smith was born in York, Pennsylvania and earned his college degree at Pennsylvania College at Gettysburg (now Gettysburg College) in 1874. He received his Ph.D. under Friedrich Wöhler at the University of Göttingen in 1876. Smith then returned to the United States and, in time, became associated with the University of Pennsylvania, as a professor of chemistry (1888-1911), as vice-provost (1899-1911) and then as provost (1911-1920). Smith's scientific research covered the fields of electrochemistry, the determination of atomic weights, and the rare-earth elements.
Smith was a co-founder of the American Chemical Society's History of Chemistry division. He served three times as president of the American Chemical Society and was president of the American Philosophical Society (1902–1908) and the History of Science Society (1928). In 1898 Smith was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
He was awarded the Priestley Medal in 1926.
Smith died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1928.
Read more about this topic: Edgar Fahs Smith
Famous quotes containing the words life and/or work:
“Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.”
—Martin Amis (b. 1949)
“As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man’s family.”
—J.M. (John Millington)