June 9, 1905.] 



SCIENCE. 



875 



credited to Samuel Guthrie (1782-1848), 

 of Sacketts Harbor, N. Y., whose researches 

 anticipated those of Soubeiran, Liebig and 

 Dumas by nearly a year. 



A committee of the Medico-chirurgical 

 Society of Edinburgh gave him the credit 

 for having first published an account of 

 the therapeutic effects of chloroform as a 

 diffusive stimulant. Dr. Guthrie was like- 

 wise the inventor of a process for the rapid 

 conversion of potato starch into sugar. He 

 also experimented with considerable bold- 

 ness in the domain of explosives, inventing 

 various fulminating compounds, which he 

 developed commercially.* 



It would be an ungracious task to dis- 

 cuss in this paper the much-controverted 

 'ether discussion,' but I may say, without 

 fear of doing injustice to any of the several 

 claimants for the honor of the discovery 

 of this important anesthetic, that Charles 

 Thomas Jackson (1805-1880), said to be 

 one of the foremosf chemists of his time 

 in this country, claimed from experiments 

 made by himself during the winter of 

 1841-2 in his own laboratory, that he ob- 

 tained results showing 'that a surgical op- 

 eration could be performed on the patient 

 under the full influence of sulphiu'ic ether 

 without giving him any pain. ' Four years 

 later ,(in 1846) this was successfully ac- 

 complished by Dr. William T. G. Morton, 

 who had studied chemistry in Dr. Jack- 

 son's laboratory. The French Academy 

 of Sciences decreed one of the Montyon 

 prizes to Jackson for his discovery of 

 etherization, and one to Morton for his ap- 

 plication of that discovery to surgical 

 operations, t 



* An account of his career has been published 

 in pamphlet form by his descendant, Ossian 

 Guthrie. 



t Dr. Jackson published a ' Manual of Etheriza- 

 tion with the History of this Discovery ' ( Boston, 

 1861) and much interesting information is to be 

 had from a ' Report of the House of Representa- 

 tives of the United States of America, vindicating 



Metallurgy is little more than the appli- 

 cation of chemical knowledge to the extrac- 

 tion of metals from their ores, and I, there- 

 fore, beg to claim for the United States 

 the first commercial production of steel. 

 Zerah Colburn, the well-known engineer, 

 gives William Kelly (1811-1888), an iron 

 master of the Suwannee furnaces of Lyon 

 County, Ky., the credit for the 'first ex- 

 periments in the conversion of melted cast 

 iron into malleable steel by blowing air in 

 jets through the mass in fusion.' Later, 

 when Sir Henry Bessemer made efforts to 

 secure the patent of the process that bears 

 his name, it was decided by the U. S. Patent 

 Office that William Kelly was the first in- 

 ventor and entitled to the patent, which 

 was promptly issued to him. In 1871, 

 when application was made for a renewal 

 of the patents originally issued to Besse- 

 mer, Mushet and Kelly, the last was suc- 

 cessful, while the claims of the first were 

 rejected.* 



The successful electro-deposition of 

 nickel and its commercial development are 

 chiefly due to the energy of Isaac Adams 

 (1836- ), a resident of Cambridge, Mass. 

 He carefully studied the siibject and foi;nd 

 that the failure to obtain satisfactory re- 

 sults was caused by the presence of nitrates 

 in the nickel solutions previously used. 

 His invention gave rise to prolonged litiga- 

 tion, but in the end he was victorious. 

 Dr. Chandler thus describes it in the fol- 



the rights of Charles T. Jackson on the Discovery 

 of the Anesthetic Effect of Ether Vapor.' The 

 other side of the controversy is given in ' The Dis- 

 covery of Modern Anesthetics: By whom it was 

 made?' by Laird W. Nevius, New York, 1894. 



* Much has been written of the claims of Kelly 

 and nearly all of the leading American metal- 

 lurgists agree in conceding his priority. Swank 

 and various writers in the Transactions of the 

 American Institute of Mining Engineers may be 

 consulted. Kelly's own story, as he gave it to the 

 present writer, appears in the Iro7i Age, February 

 2.3. 1888, p. 339. 



