ROBERT HARE. 



1781-1858. 



THE name of Robert Hare, said the American Journal of 

 Science at the time of his death, " has for more than half a cen- 

 tury been familiar to men of science as a chemical philosopher, 

 and to the cultivators of the useful arts throughout the civi- 

 lized world." Dr. Hare was born in Philadelphia, January 17, 

 1781, and died in the same place, May 15, 1858. His father, 

 the proprietor of a large brewery in Philadelphia, was an Eng- 

 lishman of strong mind, occupying a prominent position in so- 

 ciety, and enjoying the confidence of his fellow-citizens. The 

 management of this concern shortly fell into the hands of the son. 

 He was soon drawn away from it, however, by the strength 

 of his predilection for scientific pursuits ; and before he was 

 twenty years old he was enrolled as an attendant of the course 

 of lectures on chemistry and physics in Philadelphia, and be- 

 came a member of the Chemical Society of that city. There 

 he found Priestley, Sybert, and Woodhouse among his associ- 

 ates. To this society he communicated in 1801 a description 

 of the oxyhydrogen blowpipe, which was then called the hy- 

 drostatic blowpipe, and which Prof. Silliman, who had been 

 engaged with him in 1802 and 1803 in a series of experiments 

 with the instrument, afterward called the compound blowpipe. 

 On his return from Philadelphia, in 1803, Prof. Silliman con- 

 structed for Yale College the first pneumatic trough combin- 

 ing Dr. Hare's invention ; an apparatus which was afterward 

 figured and described by Dr. Hare in his memoir on the Fu- 

 sion of Strontia and the Volatilization of Platinum a paper 

 which was republished in London and in the Annales de Chimie. 

 This apparatus, according to Prof. Silliman, was the earliest and 

 most remarkable of Dr. Hare's original contributions to sci- 

 ence. It revealed to the chemical student a source of artificial 



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