Venable, Francis

The early visibility and importance of the chemical discipline were reflected in the promotion of chemists to university leadership at the turn of the century. Examples include Thomas M. Drown (President, Lehigh, 1895-1904) James Mason Crafts (President, MIT, 1897-1900) Francis P. Venable (President, North Carolina, 1900-1914) Ira Remsen (President, Johns Hopkins, 1901-1913) and Edgar Fahs Smith (Provost, Pennsylvania, 1911— 1920). The new currents in administration and their intellectual rationale were also studied closely by the period s outstanding president, the chemist Charles W. Eliot of Harvard. The subsequent decay in the visibility of chemistry is reflected in the decline of such appointments. Despite the enormous increase in the number of colleges and universities, the record decade for the appointment of chemists to permanent presidencies was 1910-1919 (Figure 6.1-4). 

Ira Rem sen John H. Long Arthur A. Noyes Francis Preston Venable William F. Hillebrand... 

See Francis P. Venable, The Development of the Periodic Law (Easton, Pa. Chemical Publishing, 1896), 233 Bohuslav Brauner, The Standard of the Atomic Weights, Chemical News 58 (1888), 307-308 Bohuslav Brauner, Die Basis der Atomgewichte, Berichte der Deutschen chemischen Gesellschaft 22 (1889), 1186-1192. 

To return to Thomsen, in a memoir of 1894 published by the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences, he offered a detailed examination of the atomic weights and their significance. His purpose was to establish that they, if only properly interpreted, revealed that the so-called atoms of our elements have evolved out of combination of particles of a common basic substance. He did not on this occasion discuss the relation to the periodic system, but this is what he did the following year, in a paper in which he proposed a new classification of the elements (Figure 8.1). From a formal point of view, Thomsen s innovation was merely to reverse periods and groups, which was not entirely original since versions of this kind had been proposed earlier, first by Thomas Bayley in 1882 and again by Carnelley in 1886. ° However, in 1894 Thomsen was unaware of these two systems, such as he stated in a letter to the American chemist Francis Venable (1856-1934), who in a book of 1896 described Thomsen s system in some detail. ... 

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