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:
“For eighteen hundred years, though perchance I have no right to say it, the New Testament has been written; yet where is the legislator who has wisdom and practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which it sheds on the science of legislation?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“[B]y going to the College [William and Mary] I shall get a more universal Acquaintance, which may hereafter be serviceable to me; and I suppose I can pursue my Studies in the Greek and Latin as well there as here, and likewise learn something of the Mathematics.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)