Josiah P. Cooke

Josiah Parsons Cooke (October 12, 1827 – September 3, 1894) was an American chemist who worked at Harvard University and was instrumental in the measurement of atomic weights, inspiring America's first Nobel laureate in chemistry, Theodore William Richards, to pursue similar research. Cooke's 1854 paper on atomic weights has been said to foreshadow the periodic law developed later by Mendeleev and others. Historian I. Bernard Cohen described Cooke "as the first university chemist to do truly distinguished work in the field of chemistry" in the United States.

Life and work

Josiah Parsons Cooke was born in Boston, Massachusetts on October 12, 1827. He attended Boston Latin School and as a teenager set up his own chemical laboratory, partly due to an interest sparked by lectures of Yale's Benjamin Silliman. The teaching of chemistry at Harvard was in poor shape at this time, so after Cooke entered the university in 1843 he continued to be largely self-taught in the subject. Cooke graduated from Harvard in 1848 with an A.B., and became a mathematics tutor there the following year. In 1850 he was elected the Erving Professor of Chemistry and Mineralogy at Harvard, although he had had little formal education in chemistry.

Reversing the modern order, after Cooke obtained his professorship he embarked on a plan of advanced study, spending eight months in Europe attending the lectures of Dumas and Regnault. On returning to the United States, Cooke began in earnest to raise the standard of chemical education at Harvard, introducing required courses in chemistry, accompanied by laboratory instruction. He was one of the first, if not the very first, in the United States to use laboratory work to teach chemistry.