Mason Science College

Mason Science College was founded by Josiah Mason in 1875 and its building in Edmund Street, Birmingham, England, was opened by Thomas Henry Huxley on 1 October 1880. In 1900 it was incorporated into the new University of Birmingham.

Notable alumni include:

  • Francis William Aston, British chemist and physicist who won the 1922 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
  • Neville Chamberlain, British Prime Minister.
  • Stanley Baldwin, British Prime Minister.
  • Sir Henry Fowler, locomotive engineer
  • C.W. Hobley, pioneering colonial administrator in Kenya
  • Frank Horton FRS Professor of Physics at Royal Holloway College and Vice-Chancellor of the University of London 1939-45
  • Henry Eliot Howard, ornithologist
  • Constance Naden, Poet & Philosopher
  • John Berry Haycraft discovered an anticoagulant created by the leech, which he named hirudin

The original Victorian Neo-Gothic building was demolished in 1962, along with the original Central Public Library and the Birmingham and Midland Institute, as part of the redevelopment within the inner ring road. The current Central Library stands on the site of the old college.

Famous quotes containing the words science and/or college:

    Whilst Marx turned the Hegelian dialectic outwards, making it an instrument with which he could interpret the facts of history and so arrive at an objective science which insists on the translation of theory into action, Kierkegaard, on the other hand, turned the same instruments inwards, for the examination of his own soul or psychology, arriving at a subjective philosophy which involved him in the deepest pessimism and despair of action.
    Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968)

    I never went near the Wellesley College chapel in my four years there, but I am still amazed at the amount of Christian charity that school stuck us all with, a kind of glazed politeness in the face of boredom and stupidity. Tolerance, in the worst sense of the word.... How marvelous it would have been to go to a women’s college that encouraged impoliteness, that rewarded aggression, that encouraged argument.
    Nora Ephron (b. 1941)