1 Who Was Henry Enfield Roscoe?

The chemist Henry Enfield Roscoe (hereafter Harry Roscoe; he was known as Harry because his father was Henry) was born in 1833, four years before the accession of Queen Victoria to the throne of Great Britain and Ireland, and he died in 1916, 15 years after Queen Victoria. When she died in January 1901, he had not known any other monarch, although he was now 68 years old. He was thus a product of the Victorian era and considered himself to be such. If he perceived a key characteristic of this period, it would have been the relative success of moderate and peaceful reform, much of which he had campaigned for himself. His grandfather William Roscoe had been a campaigner for the abolition of slavery and parliamentary reforms at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and Roscoe followed in his footsteps as a progressive Liberal. Roscoe’s lifetime also marked an important period in the relationship between Britain and Germany. When Roscoe was born, there was a personal union between Britain and the German kingdom of Hanover. Germany was a patchwork of largely small states and still largely rural. By the time of Roscoe’s death, Germany had been unified under Prussia, the new country was highly industrialized, and the two nations were now fighting each other in an increasingly desperate struggle. Roscoe had seen Germany as a model for Britain to follow, at least in the field of education and its links with industrial development, but thanks to the war the idea of adopting German methods was now anathema. This book will examine the life of Roscoe, in the context of the Victorian period on one hand, and his relationship with Germany on the other, as a chemist, an educational reformer, and a political reformer.

We have taken the biographical form to enable us to analyze key aspects of Victorian chemistry and education using the life of Roscoe as a framework. Some readers may object to the idea of writing a scientific biography as an outmoded and inevitably hagiographic way of writing the history of science. As a means for exploring a scientist’s life and work, scientific biography has received a good deal of scholarly criticism; Elizabeth Garber has suggested that, “no genre of history fell under more odium than that of biography.”¹ In the past, many biographies have focused solely on the personal life of the person or have explored their scientific work without endeavoring to bring the two together as an integrated life story; John Herivel’s biography of the French physicist and mathematician Joseph Fourier is an example of the latter.²Thomas Hankins has drawn attention to the dilemmas facing scientific biographers and how the genre was exploited and then criticized to undermine its potential value.³ He goes on to stake out the requirements for a successful outcome for the biographical approach: concentrating on the science; integrating the various component parts of the person’s life into a coherent whole; and making it readable since the genre is a literary form requiring an emphasis on the subject’s character and personality. Thomas Söderqvist, in his introduction to a compilation of essays on scientific biography, draws attention to how “public understanding of science and its practices may have been significantly shaped by the genre,” and suggests that “there has been a growing scholarly interest in discussing scientific biography in the last two decades—a tradition which apparently reflects the renaissance of the genre in the 1980s and 1990s.”⁴ Söderqvist sees Hankins’s article “as a minor citation classic” for the analysis of the genre and for setting out a content framework for scientific biography if it is to be successful.⁵

The subject’s life and their scientific work do not occur in isolation. Both are influenced by a multiplicity of interactions. However, there is also a wider intellectual context—the social, political, and economic conditions of the time—and the changes these undergo during the lifetime of the subject. This is likely to provide some difficult questions to answer and involve conflicting evidence, but this is not a reason to abandon the genre. As Mary Jo Nye has concluded, “the most compelling scientific biographies are ones that portray the ambitions, passions, disappointments, and moral choices that characterize a scientist’s life.”⁶

Many recent scientific biographies have embraced the wider intellectual context of their subject to varying degrees, but there is nearly always a balance between the themes around which the book is written and the extent to which events are presented in chronological order. One of the most acclaimed scientific biographies of recent times is Crosbie Smith and Norton Wise’s Energy and Empire, which concentrates on themes relating to Lord Kelvin’s work in physics with few contextual chapters.⁷ Its use of themes as the framework for the narrative structure has influenced many other scientific biographers. Adrian Desmond’s biography of Thomas Huxley adopts a strict chronological approach but with an overarching theme of science and religion, while Roy MacLeod’s biography of the Anglo-Australian chemist Archibald Liversidge is chronological but with each chapter having a specific theme.⁸ William H. Brock, in his biographies of Liebig and William Crookes, follows the thematic approach but with a narrative driven by chronology.⁹ By contrast, Ursula DeYoung’s biography of John Tyndall is entirely thematic.¹⁰ One biography that emphasizes the scientific context is Colin Russell’s biography of Edward Frankland.¹¹ Any author has to find the right balance between chronology and themes which not only will appease a reviewer skeptical about the biographical approach, but also will appeal to the reader. However, while most of these biographies have an introduction that sets out the thesis of the book and the importance of the subject’s life and work, few have a prologue that attempts to draw together the numerous strands developed through the chapters of the book and assess the impact of the subject’s contribution to debates and discoveries in their lifetime and how these have influenced later times.

There is no scholarly biography of Harry Roscoe, nor has any book been published that brings together the many facets of his life and analyzes them within the context of his period. Roscoe published an autobiography late in life, which is a selective collection of reminiscences about many of the events in his life and personal recollections of people he met.¹² However, as we will note from time to time below, this autobiography was seemingly written from memory and is not entirely accurate. The two best-known anecdotes in the Life and Experiences are Roscoe meeting a tramp outside Owens College soon after his arrival there, and the cheating student who was later lynched in America. The former is impossible to verify, but it is now possible to show that Roscoe’s account of the cheating student is partly incorrect. According to Roscoe, his name was Pearson, who joined Roscoe in his early years at Owens and undertook work on the atomic weight of uranium. Roscoe caught him cheating and let him go without publicizing his misdoings. He then joined the Congregationalists, got into trouble with them, and then became a nonconformist minister near Manchester. After robbing a house there, he fled to America and was eventually lynched for horse-rustling!¹³ Roscoe was clearly amused by this story about a rogue and his just deserts, but is it accurate? Remarkably there is a lengthy online biography of Robert West Pearson, the author of which appears to be unaware of the account in Roscoe’s autobiography.¹⁴ Pearson was born in Ancoats, Manchester, in 1838 to a relatively poor family. Contrary to Roscoe’s account, his education took place entirely at Owens College. He won two chemistry prizes, but he was more interested in logic and philosophy. After a relatively brief training at Cavendish College, Manchester, under the Joseph Parker mentioned by Roscoe, he applied for a post at the Great George Street Chapel in Liverpool. He was accused of plagiarizing his sermons and then it was discovered that the two doctorates he claimed to have (a PhD and an MD) were fake. Pearson then went to Park Road Church in Blackburn, where he survived until 1864 despite considerable controversy. He left Blackburn and went to America, where he became an attorney in Massachusetts. Then, after more scandals, he became a minister in the Baptist Church until yet another scandal forced his departure in 1879. After an unsuccessful attempt to take up the practice of law again, he became a preacher in San Francisco and then an Episcopalian priest in Arizona. Pearson’s colorful and scandal-ridden life came to an end in Los Angeles in 1890, not through being lynched for horse-stealing, but by a stroke.

Roscoe’s former student and colleague in Manchester, Sir (Thomas) Edward Thorpe, wrote a relatively brief biography which is effectively an expanded obituary, as Thorpe admitted in his “advertisement” at the front.¹⁵ His account draws heavily on Roscoe’s autobiography, supplemented by personal recollections and Roscoe’s correspondence, but in the fashion of the day, he does not always reveal the identity of the other party. Both books provide a starting point for our work, and we have included the personal insights that both volumes provide when they have proved to be both apposite and accurate.

The close examination of one person’s life in an important period of history allows us to see how much is owed to chance and opportunities, and how much is achieved by the seizing of these opportunities by the “prepared mind,” to use the phrase of Roscoe’s friend Louis Pasteur. Finally, by restricting ourselves to a specific time frame, the lifetime of Roscoe, we can examine more clearly how the activities of the late Victorian period have shaped our own period and how their concerns are reflected in our own time. By bringing all these different aspects together, we can better understand both Harry Roscoe and the world he inhabited, which he did so much to change.

Roscoe was born in London, but his family came from Liverpool and several members of his extended family, notably the Jevons, were still living in Liverpool. Furthermore, after his father’s premature death, Roscoe moved to Liverpool and went to school there. However, we have called him a Lancastrian rather than a Liverpudlian for good reasons. We want to emphasize his connection with the northwest generally, rather than specifically with Liverpool (which was still part of Lancashire at the time) and to link his background with Manchester. His family originally came from Charnock Richard, a small village southwest of Chorley, which emphasizes his Lancastrian background. Several important chemists in the nineteenth century came from Lancashire, including James Sheridan Muspratt and Edward Frankland, as well as the industrial chemists John Mercer, Edmund Knowles Muspratt, and James Hargreaves, among others.¹⁶ We cannot fully understand Roscoe unless we consider his love of Lancashire and its people. His grandfather William Roscoe, the son of a Liverpool market gardener and publican, become a Radical MP for Liverpool, despite his opposition to the slave trade—the slave trade and the wider “triangular trade” being the major source of Liverpool’s wealth up to that time. The Roscoe family were members of the (English) Presbyterian church and stayed in the church when it adopted Unitarianism in the late eighteenth century.¹⁷ Roscoe embraced his Unitarian heritage and remained a member of the church throughout his life, but it was never a large part of his outlook, nor was his social network largely Unitarian. He was good friends with Bernhard Samuelson, but was not close to other Unitarian politicians, most notably Joseph Chamberlain.

Roscoe was a member of the last generation whose education was affected by their non-adherence to the Church of England.¹⁸ He was not able to take a degree at Oxford or Cambridge Universities because of his inability to subscribe to the 39 Articles of the Church of England. Oxford had allowed nonconformists to take the Bachelor of Arts degree in 1854, and Cambridge followed two years later. However, Roscoe would not have been able to gain an academic position at Oxford or Cambridge until the Universities Test Acts (which abolished all religious tests at Oxford, Cambridge, and Durham) was passed in 1871, and after the act was passed, he was almost immediately offered a chair at Oxford, which he declined.¹⁹ Roscoe had little time for the tutorial methods used at Oxford and Cambridge and he rightly believed that the teaching at University College London was far superior to the new natural sciences course at Oxford. Similarly in later years, he had no desire to take up a chair of chemistry at Oxford, although he was a good friend of Benjamin Collins Brodie and he could have greatly influenced the teaching of the subject at Oxford by making research part of the undergraduate degree, as another Mancunian professor, William Henry Perkin Jr., finally achieved in the 1910s.²⁰ It is thus curious that his only son Edmund was an undergraduate at Oxford, and his early death while he was there doubtless did little to improve Roscoe’s view of that ancient university.

With the accession of Queen Victoria, the personal union with Hanover was broken and Germany became just another foreign country. In 1837 it was still a loose federation of states and Austria’s power over the German Federation was waning. After the hope of a democratic German republic was raised and then crushed in 1848–1850, Prussia became the nucleus for a different kind of German unification. Hanover was annexed by Prussia in 1866 and the German Empire was formed in 1871. British hopes lay in the accession of Friedrich, the son-in-law of Queen Victoria, to the German throne, but his father lived to be 90 and Friedrich reigned for only 98 days before dying of throat cancer in 1888. By this time, Germany was industrializing rapidly and the two countries were keen trade rivals.²¹ Many reformers, including Roscoe, believed that England had to adopt the best features of the German educational system in order to compete with Germany and other countries.

Thanks to his education in Heidelberg in the mid-1850s, Roscoe was a great admirer of German education and science. His chemical researches were all closely linked to Robert Bunsen’s own research. The laboratory building he constructed in the early 1870s at Owens College, which became a model for other British university laboratories, was almost entirely based on the laboratory building Bunsen erected in Heidelberg between 1853 and 1855, which Roscoe saw being built and was one of its first occupants.²² His interest in the practical applications of chemistry and his links with industry reflected Bunsen’s own interest in the economic value of chemistry and his investigation of blast furnaces gases in particular. Roscoe’s own teaching and promotion of original research as the best way to advance chemistry faithfully followed the German model he encountered in Heidelberg. His deep knowledge of the German education system, his companionship with German scientists, and his ardent conviction that it was probably the best educational system in the world made him immensely influential in Britain in the 1870s and 1880s when there was a general belief that the British educational system had to be completely overhauled.

Furthermore, Roscoe’s political views can be placed in a German context. Coming as he did from a liberal nonconformist English background, Roscoe encountered many liberals in Germany in the tolerant state of Baden, including his original sponsor Robert von Mohl, who briefly had been minister of justice in the revolutionary German government of 1848. As a result of his stay in the country, Roscoe had a deep and abiding love of Germany, while being less enthusiastic about Prussia or Berlin. The outbreak of World War I and the strident support for Germany’s actions by his German academic friends—the so-called Manifesto of the Ninety-Three—must have been devastating to the elderly Roscoe.

Although he was a Londoner by birth (and university education), and Liverpudlian by ancestry (and secondary education), Roscoe became an important figure in Manchester. Roscoe arrived at Owens College, Manchester, to prepare for the start of the new academic year in October 1857 as the new Professor of Chemistry in succession to Edward Frankland, who had resigned and taken a position at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London. Roscoe’s arrival in Manchester was not a foregone conclusion. Although he came from a well-known Liverpool family, he had no connections with Manchester and had no particular reason to go there. Had things turned out differently, Roscoe may well have become a London-based entrepreneurial freelance chemist like William Crookes, who was six months older. Even his appointment was by no means certain. At the interviews he faced strong competition from two local men, Frederick Crace Calvert and Robert Angus Smith, both of whom—like Frankland—had worked with Lyon Playfair.

The Manchester that Roscoe moved to was very different from Heidelberg which was a university town set in hilly countryside, with a population of around 15,000 in the mid-1850s, of which perhaps about a thousand were students.²³ Manchester had once been a small country town with a population of 9,000 in 1717, although still twice the size of Heidelberg in the same year.²⁴ But in stark contrast to Heidelberg, Manchester was transformed by the industrial revolution, and the population of the municipal borough had reached 303,043 by 1851.²⁵ The growth and prosperity of Manchester was largely a result of the cotton industry. Manchester had become known as “Cottonopolis”: importing raw cotton from India and the United States; spinning and weaving cotton fabrics; followed by dyeing and printing; and then exporting fabrics for making up as clothing or furnishings. The cotton industry had slowly metamorphosed from a domestic trade into industrial-scale production in large factory buildings accommodating innovative machinery (the spinning jenny, the spinning frame, and the spinning mule), all driven by steam power, and with a dramatic increase in output.²⁶ The import of raw cotton fluctuated in cycles during the 1800s in step with periods of war with France. The total imports of raw cotton into Britain in 1792 were 34,907,497 pounds (98,054 bales), but by 1850 these imports had grown to 685,600,00 pounds (1,749,300 bales); this represented about 80% of world cotton.²⁷ By 1815 cotton textiles were Britain’s largest export, most of it produced in Manchester and the surrounding area. The number of mills in Manchester itself peaked at 108, just before Roscoe’s arrival, in 1853. The cotton industry in turn boosted the machine-making industry, which then diversified away from textile machinery. Textile manufacture also stimulated industries with a more direct chemical connection, such as bleaching, dyeing, and calico-printing. One of the largest calico-printing firms in Europe, Edmund Potter, was based in nearby Glossop. Edmund Potter himself would become Roscoe’s father-in-law in 1863. Manchester’s industrialization was accompanied by vibrant commercial enterprise. The leading industrial and commercial figures were active in Manchester’s cultural, scientific, and political institutions, and many became national luminaries.

Turning to the chemical industry itself, the most interesting chemical firm in Manchester in the 1850s was the dyestuffs company of Roberts, Dale & Company of Cornbrook, founded in 1852.²⁸ They started to make the first synthetic dye, picric acid, with the help of Calvert, and then oxalic acid. At the end of the 1850s the firm began to employ German chemists, initially Rudolph Koepp (who soon left), then Heinrich Caro and Carl Alexander Martius, followed by other German chemists. This group of German chemists created several important dyes, most notably Manchester Yellow, before returning to Germany in the mid-1860s. Martius was the co-founder of Agfa in Berlin, and Caro became the research leader of BASF in Ludwigshafen. In this way, two of the major German dyestuff companies had their origins in Manchester. In the mid-1850s, Potter, working with Robert Rumney of the Ardwick Chemical Works, developed a process for the manufacture of the purple dye murexide from guano, which has a strong claim to be the second synthetic dye after picric acid.

By the 1830s Manchester had also become a thriving scientific and cultural center, with institutions of national and international renown. The Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, founded in 1781, built “on the wealth and prestige of the 18th-century town [that] lay with its clergy, professional men and merchant manufacturers.”²⁹ In 1823 the Royal Manchester Institution was founded to provide gallery space for fine art displays and to organize programs of scientific lectures. In 1843 Lyon Playfair was appointed the first Professor of Chemistry with Robert Angus Smith as his assistant; both had trained with the eminent chemist and educator Justus Liebig in Giessen and were awarded a PhD there. By the 1840s these institutions had been joined by the Manchester Natural History Society (founded 1821), the Manchester Mechanics’ Institution (1824), the Manchester Statistical Society (1833), the Manchester Athenaeum (1835), and the Manchester Geological Society (1838). Many of the members of these societies were also members of London-based institutions, “thus providing a useful bridgehead between Manchester and London, and bringing mutual benefits.”³⁰ The Manchester Statistical Society was one of the earliest statistical societies in Britain and took a lead in the use of statistics for advancing the social sciences and social policies. It was a paper read at one of their meetings in 1836 that first drew attention to the benefits of Manchester having a university.

When Owens College was founded in 1851, it began a long and at times tortuous journey on the path to university status that required government and parliamentary approval and finally a Royal Charter. In the 1850s there were several models aspiring universities could adopt based on existing institutions: broadly, Oxford and Cambridge with their tutorial approach to learning, or University College London with its reliance on lectures and laboratory instruction (for the sciences). But at the core of all universities were instruction at the higher education level, examinations, and the awarding of degrees.

There was much debate about the purpose of university education and the university curriculum. For John Henry Newman in the 1850s, the purpose of university education was to develop lifelong skills without any focus on specific occupations and that no subject should be excluded from the curriculum (including theology and the sciences); in reviewing the current methods of instruction, Newman favored a self-learning approach for students through interactions with fellow students, and to the exclusion of professors and examinations.³¹ By the 1850s there was broad support among the newer universities for a general or liberal education that ranged across the humanities and the sciences, rather than focusing on a narrow range of subjects or on specific occupations. Later, with local communities providing much of the finance (as in the case of Manchester), there was a shift toward specific careers and professions to enhance local labor markets. This created a sharper dichotomy of purpose for universities that remains a contentious issue for government departments, educational institutions, policy planners, and the public even today.

Although Roscoe joined Owens College after it was founded, he was central to its expansion and its elevation to university status as Victoria University. Robert Kargon portrays the foundation of Owens College in 1851 as developing alongside other cultural institutions because of the concerns of local people for institutions that reflected the standing of Manchester as the major industrial and commercial town in Britain, while Anna Guagnini stresses the part played by the “rich scientific community” in Manchester.³² Roscoe became a key figure after the College’s foundation, taking the lead in securing the future for the College after its initially shaky start, by relocating it to the Oxford Road site in 1873 and in the establishment of Victoria University as a federal university in 1880.

Although he was not head of the College, it was his determination and tenacity that proved crucial to the success of its expansion. He came to realize that in order for Owens College to have a stable future, it was necessary to garner support from Manchester industrialists and merchants and convince them of the need for well-qualified managers and foremen. Manchester had already become the leading industrial center in Britain, but industrialists supported Owens College to ensure continued economic growth and prosperity as new technical advances emerged.³³ Other major towns and cities created universities to secure the same outcomes. Overall, this theme allows us to explore, through the prism of Roscoe, the connection between Owens College and industry and how far this formed a paradigm for other civic universities in their relationship with industry. To fully examine this duality, it is important to point out that no theme stands alone, but is linked to several others.

In forging these links, Roscoe campaigned on several fronts to demonstrate the benefits of universities and industry working together, of which his proactive consultancy work formed a crucial part. Besides his role in the chemistry department, Roscoe was active in creating other links between Owens College and industry. Roscoe drew on his wide network of associates in engineering and in the chemical industry for financial support in developing Owens College: an especially influential group of engineers in Manchester that included Charles Beyer of Messrs. Beyer, Peacock & Company; Joseph Whitworth and William Fairbairn raised funding to create a chair in engineering, as Guagnini has highlighted; while a prominent group of chemical manufacturers that included Messrs. Brooke, Simpson & Spiller, Messrs. Gaskell, Deacon, & Company, Messrs. Muspratt & Company, and Messrs. W. Gossage & Company contributed to funds for chemical laboratories.³⁴ But the influence of these industrialists went beyond just funding, to advising on appointments and the content of courses. Several were appointed trustees of the College.

For Roscoe, the relationship between a university and its locality was crucial for Owens College, but this duality was important for the civic university movement as a whole, since each was founded within their locality, receiving support (and funding) while also, like Owens, having to serve the interests of industry and commerce. Michael Sanderson concluded that Owens College became a model for the civic university movement because of its careful balancing of the sciences and the arts; most civic universities followed Owens but with some variations due to their localities.³⁵ There is then the role of a university’s buildings beyond accommodating the different academic functions. Sophie Forgan draws attention to the role of architecture in defining a distinct alternative to Oxbridge, while the presence of a university could bestow status on a town.³⁶

Other issues to emerge for Owens College (and other aspiring universities) were the role of research in the search for new knowledge and understanding and the inclusion of a medical faculty. Under the influence of scientists such as Liebig and Bunsen, research had become an important part of German university education, and the many British students (including Roscoe) who had studied in Germany became strong advocates of research when taking up posts in British universities.³⁷ Research was a critical element of university education for Roscoe, not just for the sciences but for the humanities as well; the embrace of research became a driving force for Owens College and the new civic universities.³⁸ The inclusion of a medical faculty at Owens College was supported by Roscoe, but serious organizational and financial issues in the context of national concern over the proliferation of medical schools and medical qualification (where no national system existed) took many years to resolve (Figure 1.1).³⁹

Roscoe was respected by his contemporaries as a chemical educator, rather than as a leading researcher (despite his commitment to research). He transformed Owens College into one of the major centers of academic chemistry in Britain, and his students founded schools at other new universities, including Leeds and Newcastle. At Owens College, Roscoe taught chemistry through a series of graduated practical exercises, followed by original research. He argued that this kind of teaching promoted “freedom of enquiry, independence of thought, disinterested and steadfast labour, habits of exact and truthful observation, and of clear perception.”⁴⁰ As Roscoe acknowledged, this method of chemical training was introduced in the laboratory of Justus Liebig at Giessen.⁴¹ Liebig’s laboratory was closely examined by Jack Morrell in his now legendary paper on “the chemist breeders.”⁴² He introduced the concept of “research school” and compared Liebig’s research school with Thomas Thomson’s research school at Glasgow (although arguably Thomson never had one). He identified several factors as being crucial, including institutional and financial support, the scientific reputation of the school’s leader, and the leader’s charisma. One of the dangers of Morrell’s paper was the priority it gave to Giessen. This has been contested by Homburg, who argued a good case that Friedrich Stromeyer at Göttingen (Bunsen’s teacher and hence Roscoe’s intellectual “grandfather”) could be considered the birthplace of modern chemical training, although as Rocke has pointed out, Stromeyer taught inorganic analysis rather than research.⁴³ Roscoe used a combination of inorganic analysis, practical organic chemistry, and in the case of the most able students, original research in the fourth and fifth years to teach chemistry.

Given the paucity of students at Owens when he arrived, Roscoe had to develop a persuasive case for the value of the chemistry course (degrees were not obligatory at Owens).⁴⁴ He argued that the course was suitable for men going into professional or commercial life, especially chemical manufacturing. He pointed out that German chemical manufacturers did not take chemists unless they had done original research.⁴⁵ Another important career for chemistry students was school teaching, and this was obviously connected to the introduction of science teaching in schools in this period. This symbiotic relationship with industry and business was very different from the situation at Oxbridge. Gerrylynn Roberts has studied the teaching of chemistry at Cambridge during the long tenure (1861–1908) of Roscoe’s contemporary George Downing Liveing.⁴⁶ The focus of the Cambridge chemistry course was on agriculture and medicine, reflecting its clientele of landowners and physicians rather than businessmen and industrialists.⁴⁷

Thanks to his training in Germany, Roscoe had a specifically Germanic vision for the creation of what became an outstanding chemical school at Owens College. He was influenced at different stages of his life by his schoolteacher William Balmain, Thomas Graham and Alexander Williamson at University College London (UCL), and, as we have seen, Bunsen at Heidelberg. In a series of papers, the Israeli sociologist Joseph Ben-David analyzed the factors for the supremacy of German science in the second half of the nineteenth century. He identified the innovative and flexible nature of German science as the main reason and argued that this stemmed from the competition between German universities and their lack of centralization.⁴⁸ However, Ben-David also came to realize that the hierarchical nature of German science, with its all-powerful institute director, suppressed innovation and new disciplines.⁴⁹ Ben-David argued that the foreign students in Germany had a misleading impression about German education, having gone through neither the secondary education system nor the undergraduate system with all their drawbacks. They therefore took an idealized view of a research-based education back to their own countries.⁵⁰ We will study how Roscoe applied what he saw at first hand in Germany and how he modified it to meet the local conditions, in particular the creation of the specifically English concept of a department, rather than the German institute. The design of the laboratories and its debt to Heidelberg has been discussed by one of the authors (PJTM).⁵¹ He concludes that the most important aspect of the laboratories at Owens College was the way they established a template for other universities and the architectural partnership of Alfred Waterhouse (a Unitarian like Roscoe) as the preeminent designer of British university laboratories.

The contrast and competition between the English (specifically the UCL) model of chemistry teaching and the hierarchical German model is the theme of the pioneering work of Yoshiyuki Kikuchi on the setting up of the chemistry school at the Imperial University in Tokyo.⁵² He examines how the final character of the department was shaped by this competition, which the Anglophile group eventually won. He presents the interaction of the English influence, the German influence, and the Japanese milieu in terms of “contact zones,” a concept introduced by Mary Louise Pratt in the field of transcultural studies.⁵³

Roscoe was adamant about the importance of studying the fundamental principles of chemistry as they underpinned the applied or technological aspects, in his view, as Robert Bud and Gerrylynn Roberts have analyzed.⁵⁴ In this Roscoe followed in the footsteps of German chemists such as Liebig and Bunsen, who, as Christoph Meinel points out, adopted the Humboldtian concept of university education that focused on pure chemistry rather than applied chemistry.⁵⁵ At Owens College, Watson Smith was given the title of Lecturer of Technological Chemistry in 1884, an attempt to keep industrial chemistry within the fold of pure chemistry while acknowledging the importance of the industrial aspects of chemistry.⁵⁶ For Roscoe, teaching technologists meant, “science, science, science,” as he expressed in a talk to the Society of Chemical Industry in 1884.⁵⁷ Roscoe’s firm stance on pure chemistry brought him into conflict with some manufacturers. Martin Saltzman has mapped the lengthy debates between Roscoe and Ivan Levinstein, the Manchester dyestuffs manufacturer, whether academic laboratories should serve as research laboratories for local companies.⁵⁸ Levinstein demanded more support from institutions such as Victoria University (the former Owens College).

Partly because of his experience in expanding Owens College and partly because of his belief that the English education system was flawed, Roscoe became an ardent educational reformer. At the time of the Great Exhibition in 1851, Britain appeared to be on the crest of the wave. Not only did it have the largest economy in the world, its products were widely admired, as evidenced by the awards won by British manufacturers at the Great Exhibition.⁵⁹ Furthermore, despite Charles Babbage’s “Decline of Science” campaign in the 1830s, British science was still world-leading with the work of Michael Faraday in electricity, James Joule in thermodynamics, John Herschel in astronomy, Charles Darwin in biology, Charles Lyell in geology, and James Clerk Maxwell about to unify electricity and magnetism in the 1860s. Even in chemistry, Britain held a respectable position thanks to Thomas Graham, Alexander Williamson, and Edward Frankland, and by having the leading German chemist August Wilhelm Hofmann (who even Anglicized his name to William Hofmann) in its midst.⁶⁰ Not unnaturally, this apparent economic and scientific superiority created the belief—especially among industrialists—that Britain must be doing things right.⁶¹

The British system of technical training in the 1850s and for many decades thereafter was based on the time-honored apprentice system, or in industries lacking an apprentice system, by learning on the job, which was called “picking up.”⁶² By contrast, both the owners of industrial firms and their workers regarded university education with suspicion. The English (as opposed to the Scottish) university system was based on Oxford and Cambridge, which were open only to those accepting the tenets of the Church of England. In the early nineteenth century, new universities appeared, but two of them (Durham and King’s College London) were also Anglican, leaving just University College London open to nonconformists. Many businessmen and industrialists in this period were nonconformists. Few of them had any university education or saw any need for one—it is perhaps a truism that one has to have had a university education to appreciate the value of it. The Unitarian textile industrialist George Courtauld remarked in 1856 that “I have had some little experience now, and my feeling is very strongly that, for the great majority of young men in our position in life, a college course is not fit preparation for business life.”⁶³ It is also important to understand that the apprentice system was approved by the trade unions as much as (if not more than) the management.⁶⁴ The entrant into the industry was trained by unionized master workers, and the system also limited the number of new workers, thereby maintaining higher wages.

The proposition that British industry needed more university-educated (or at least technically trained) workers came from educators, educationalists, and their political allies, not industry. One could maintain that their argument was a self-interested one, that they needed more students and money, and the best (perhaps the only) way to do this was to persuade the British government (if not British industry) that Britain was falling behind other countries, especially Germany, in economic terms.⁶⁵ One might assume, given the woeful tone of the debates about British competitiveness, that Britain was becoming an economic basket-case or at the very least was standing still.⁶⁶ Nothing could be further from the truth. The British gross domestic product (GDP) almost trebled between 1820 and 1870 (the point at which these debates were beginning), and indeed its growth was very slightly greater than Germany in this period despite being a mature economic power.⁶⁷ Between 1870 and 1913, Britain declined in economic terms, relatively speaking, as its GDP “only” increased by 2.2 times, compared with Germany’s 3.3 times. Although its GDP (in purchasing power parity terms) in absolute terms grew by over 124 billion 1990 international dollars, Germany’s GDP increased by 165 billion dollars, and hence Germany had overtaken Britain by 1913 by around 12 billion dollars. However, it should also be noted, the British economy grew at 1.85% a year (compared with 2.05% in the period 1820–1870), at a time when Britain supposedly went through the so-called Great Depression.⁶⁸ Furthermore, in terms of GDP per capita, Britain remained substantially ahead of Germany until the 1960s.⁶⁹

When comparing Britain and Germany in this period, chemistry seems to be a good example to take and has often been used as such.⁷⁰ However, considering the chemical industry, it has to be remembered that Britain was predominant in the Leblanc soda industry, which did not require many educated chemists. Furthermore, Britain dominated several important industrial sectors, including textiles and shipbuilding, until World War I.⁷¹

By the late nineteenth century, academic German chemistry had reached world-class status, but so had history and that most characteristic of German subjects, philology. At Heidelberg, there were far more students in the 1850s taking law or theology than those taking chemistry.⁷² However, these subjects did not have the economic implications of chemistry. The German system—unable to absorb all its chemistry graduates in academia or school teaching—poured its chemists into the chemical industry.⁷³ As the German synthetic dye industry expanded in the 1870s and especially the 1880s, these chemists were very useful and doubtlessly made the German industry world-beating. If the British industry was to employ more trained chemists, where were these chemists to come from? We should not lose sight of the fact that there were several places in Britain that offered chemical courses: by the 1860s even Oxford and Cambridge were teaching chemistry. Yet the chemical industry, on those relatively rare occasions when it sought academically trained chemists, found them hard to recruit. Reputedly this was the reason that William Henry Perkin left the dye industry in 1873.⁷⁴ As British chemistry graduates were reluctant to work in industry, firms had to employ German or Swiss chemists; for example, Ferdinand Hurter, who joined Gaskell, Deacon & Company of Widnes in 1867. After the reunification of Germany in 1871, few German chemists were willing to work in Britain. Yet teaching more British chemistry students would in the short run create a demand for more chemistry teachers. A massive expansion of chemistry teaching was effectively impossible because of the lack of suitably qualified graduates. This is perhaps one reason why Roscoe told the Devonshire Commission that the German universities were overstaffed.

The triumph of English education in the late nineteenth century was the introduction of universal literacy (and presumably numeracy) after William Forster’s Elementary Education Act of 1870 and Anthony Mundella’s Elementary Education Act of 1880, which compelled children to attend school up to the age of 12.⁷⁵ By 1914 practically all men and women in Britain could read and write. For certain social groups the effect was astounding: literacy among miners grew from less than half in 1874–1879 to almost complete literacy by 1904–1909. The next step was to improve secondary education and to include more science in the secondary curriculum. This was a work in progress and would take longer, but the task was taken in hand by civil servants such as William de W. Abney, who oversaw the building of school laboratories.⁷⁶ The real problem was at the third level, beyond the age of 14 or 16. Technical education was both more labor-intensive and expensive. If there was actually a need for workers to be better trained, how were they going to receive this training? In keeping with the tradition of apprenticeships and “picking-up,” the emphasis in Britain was on in-job training, which in practice meant evening classes. This was a route which remained popular until the 1960s.

In what way was the German educational system advocated by Roscoe (and others) better? Certainly, in terms of literacy, it was no better: Germany achieved universal literacy about the same time as Britain.⁷⁷ Its system of more practically oriented secondary schools (the Realschule and the Realgymnasium) was praised and in the 1870s had no counterpart in England. At the tertiary level, the Germans had the Technische Hochschule, which also had no exact English equivalent.⁷⁸ In contrast to Britain, a chemist or engineer was expected to learn the principles before starting a job, which meant that they were filled with theoretical knowledge, but had little practical experience.⁷⁹ However, there is a need to be cautious here. The standard Gymnasium was as classics-oriented as any English public school. And in the late nineteenth century, the Technische Hochschulen were not considered to be on the same level as the universities and could not award PhDs until about 1900. Furthermore, there was an inconsistency on the part of Roscoe (and other Germanophiles) in that they argued for the importance of teaching pure chemistry and hence the basic principles underlying industrial chemistry, rather than teaching applied chemistry as the Technische Hochschulen did in Germany. In the end, Roscoe and his colleagues at Owens College reached a compromise in the 1880s: applied chemistry became part of the chemical curriculum without becoming a separate subject.

The consultant chemist had emerged as an occupational group by the mid-nineteenth century when rapid industrialization and urban expansion necessitated the analysis of air, water, and food to meet safety standards.⁸⁰ Many chemists took up consultancy work between academic appointments, not just as chemical analysts, but advising industrial enterprises how to make their processes work more efficiently, or recommending modifications to existing plants or even plant or process replacement, since such knowledge and expertise were not available within the industrial firms. Roscoe came to appreciate the close connection between chemistry and industry from his association with Bunsen, who had always sought to make chemistry useful to industry. Bunsen had demonstrated the importance and benefits of this link in collaboration with Lyon Playfair in a research project to improve iron smelting using his new analytical technique of gasometry (funded by the British Association for the Advancement of Science, BAAS).⁸¹ Many British chemists, both academic chemists and independent chemical consultants, conducted research projects funded by the BAAS to address technical deficiencies across industrial sectors and not individual businesses. Chemical consultants drew on their chemical knowledge and often access to specialist instrumentation in carving out this occupational niche.

Roscoe, having returned from his studies with Bunsen and before his appointment at Owens College, contemplated a career as a chemical consultant since there were few academic appointments, especially for a young chemist.⁸² At Owens College, however, Roscoe needed to persuade local industrialists of the value of a pure chemical education for their sons, in order to gain much-needed financial support and students.⁸³ Here, too, he was following in the footsteps of Bunsen, who welcomed the sons of several important English industrialists into his laboratory, as William H. Brock has examined in detail.⁸⁴ Furthermore, like some (but not all) academic chemists of the period, Roscoe was happy to take on a wide range of consultancy work, especially the regulation of air pollution, though such enterprise did not escape some criticism from outside Owens. But not all academic chemists supported the link with industry. Ira Remsen of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore was totally opposed to the involvement of academic chemists with industry, despite having a German education similar to Roscoe’s.⁸⁵

Roscoe was the leading founder of the Society of Chemical Industry (SCI) in 1881, which was specifically formed to strengthen the links between academia and industry, though as Wilfred Farrar points out, this was mainly an initiative of the chemical industry in response to the German example where there was “the rapid application of academic discoveries to large-scale production.”⁸⁶ Through the SCI, the interlocution between academia and industry was aided by regular meetings across the country and by the publication of a journal that informed members of recent advances in chemistry likely to improve the performance of chemical industry.⁸⁷

Toward the end of his working life, Roscoe’s role with industry changed dramatically when he became a director of the Aluminium Company and a founder director of the associated Castner–Kellner Alkali Company. Roscoe was closely associated with developing this new electrolytic technology for manufacturing alkalis, replacing the heavily polluting Leblanc process.⁸⁸ That the Castner–Kellner process operates today largely unchanged is indicative of the scale of its innovation.

Up to 1885, Roscoe had operated outside of Parliament and was in no sense a professional politician. Yet at the end of 1885, Roscoe was elected as MP for the relatively prosperous South Manchester constituency and served in Parliament for almost 10 years. This career change was partly a reaction to the recent death of his only son Edmund and his subsequent desire to leave Manchester, with all its memories of a happier time.⁸⁹ We have noted that his grandfather William Roscoe had been an MP for Liverpool. His father-in-law Edmund Potter had been the Liberal MP for Carlisle from 1861 to 1874. He was an MP in a turbulent period when the dominant issue was Irish Home Rule, a political question which divided the Liberal Party, but Roscoe remained devoted to Gladstone despite the Grand Old Man’s lack of interest in or understanding of modern science.⁹⁰ Hence Roscoe provides an excellent case study for the relationship between academic science and parliamentary politics. He was a scientist who was an MP, rather than a politician with a scientific background. The major issues that arose while Roscoe was in Parliament, for example, Irish Home Rule or the rise of socialism, were not topics that he was particularly concerned about or to which he made a major contribution.⁹¹ David Bebbington has characterized the period between 1870 and 1910 as the high water of nonconformist politics, invariably from the Liberal side of the Commons (they were barely represented in the Lords).⁹²While Roscoe as a Unitarian supported all the causes dear to the nonconformist heart, from overcrowded housing to slavery, he never played a major role in nonconformist issues. Indeed, his campaign for museums to be open on Sundays was opposed by Sabbatarian nonconformists.⁹³

What can scientists bring to the political table? Can their scientific training give them a broad perspective on politics, or are they best employed by applying themselves to specific science-related issues? Roscoe did not make a major impression on the House of Commons and tended to favor speeches (and parliamentary questions) on scientific matters such as medical regulation, ventilation of the Houses of Parliament, the control of cholera in Mecca, and the introduction of the metric system.⁹⁴ He was a Vice-President of the Decimal Association and with Lord Kelvin supported a bill for compulsory metrication in 1904.⁹⁵ Roscoe associated with a like-minded circle of Liberal MPs mostly from a business or academic background with a strong radical streak, especially in the field of educational reform. One of the few political historians to study Roscoe’s political career, James Moore, positions him as part of a local movement to promote radical Liberalism in Manchester in 1880s.⁹⁶ According to Moore, he was part of “an enlightened, meritocratic and moral force opposed to a self-interested and unenlightened property-owning elite.”⁹⁷ Can scientists become accustomed to the grind of politics, or do they soon tire of its excessive demands? Roscoe gradually found the demands of the parliamentary life irksome, especially when Liberal MPs had to stay around in case there was an opportunity to ambush the Conservative and Liberal Unionist government. In all honesty, he was not completely unhappy to lose his seat to a Liberal Unionist in 1895.⁹⁸

After he lost his seat in 1895, rather than returning full-time to academia, Roscoe became a builder of new or reformed institutions, including the University of London, the Lister Institute, and the Science Museum. As Robert Bud has pointed out, the end of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century were a period of energetic reform and the development of new or reinvigorated institutions.⁹⁹ This period encompassed the setting up of the Laboratory of the Government Chemist in 1894, headed by Roscoe’s former colleague Thomas Edward Thorpe, and the National Physical Laboratory in 1900.¹⁰⁰ After the unexpected death of the previous holder of the post, Roscoe served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of London at the end of the nineteenth century and introduced reforms recommended by two commissions of inquiries.¹⁰¹ By converting the University of London from being an examining body back to its original concept as a federation of London-based colleges, he thus had an important impact on London’s university as well as Manchester’s. Roscoe supported the formation of the Institute for Preventive Medicine (which became the Lister Institute) in 1891 and he assisted its incorporation by parliamentary act in the Commons.¹⁰² He then became involved with its management, which eventually became a heavy burden in the years leading up to his death. Finally, in one of his last public actions, Roscoe aided his old friend Norman Lockyer and the pioneering civil servant Robert Morant with the detaching of the Science Museum in South Kensington from the Victoria & Albert Museum to become a free-standing institution in 1909.¹⁰³

Roscoe lived in a period of unprecedented change in Britain. He came from a middle-class background, and the Victorian era was one in which the balance of power shifted from the aristocracy to the middle class. Britain became industrialized—the urban population of England and Wales exceeded the rural population by the Census of 1891—and British cities witnessed explosive growth. Roscoe lived in the major cities of London, Liverpool, and Manchester. Science became a professional activity rather than an amateur pursuit. People began to take degrees in scientific subjects, and Roscoe was a professional scientist with academic qualifications. William Whewell famously introduced the term “scientist” the year Roscoe was born. The chemical industry also grew enormously and diversified into new fields such as dyes and pharmaceuticals, not always with happy results for Britain. With his close links to industry, Roscoe was part of that process, and he was aware of the issues it raised, from river pollution to the threat from German industry.

It might seem self-evident that a country undergoing such massive change had to change the way it did things, to move from a system suitable for a largely land-based society to one which was appropriate for an urbanized and industrialized society. Yet Britain (and England in particular) was a deeply conservative country and these changes came slowly. The main concern of the Conservatives was to maintain the institutions of the old system, such as the established churches, the monarchy, and the House of Lords. Some of the most controversial changes opposed by the Conservatives involved the established church, which pitted Anglicans against nonconformists. On the other hand, the Conservatives and their Liberal Unionist allies did as much to reform education as the Liberals. While the Conservatives were sometimes willing to extend the electoral franchise for party advantage, they were happy to use the unelected and hereditary House of Lords to block reforming measures which had passed the House of Commons, above all Irish Home Rule. Matters came to a head in 1909 when the Lords blocked Lloyd George’s so-called people’s budget, with its aim to place more taxes on the wealthy to pay for new social welfare programs (such as a state pension for older people). The House of Lords rejected the Parliament Bill which would remove their veto on parliamentary legislation. Roscoe’s name was near the top of the list of the 250 peers that Prime Minister Herbert Asquith would have demanded from the new monarch George V if the House of Lords had continued to reject the bill.¹⁰⁴ In the end, the House of Lords gave way and Roscoe never became a peer (and he probably did not want to become one, as he had a low opinion of the upper chamber and he was now suffering from poor health). Had Roscoe been ennobled in this way, it would have been a hereditary peerage as there were no life peerages until 1958, but as his only son Edmund had died in 1885, there would have been no heir.

What united the rival groups within the “science reform movement” in which Roscoe was a major player was the concept that this was as much a cultural struggle as a campaign for more funding. The leading sociocultural groups in England in the mid-nineteenth century were the landed gentry and military officers, who usually sprang from this group; the established clergy, also associated with the landed gentry for the most part; the traditional professions such as law and medicine, and the financiers who worked in the City of London. The industrialists of northern England, the nonconformist clergy, and the new professions such as pharmacy and chemistry were outside this elite. It was not entirely a matter of wealth. Individual landowners and many of the established clergy were impoverished as a result of the prolonged depression in British agriculture. Nonetheless, this elite had an established position in British society which scientists hitherto lacked. The science reformers were determined to break into this charmed circle and at least partly succeeded. For example, in May 1904, several leading scientists, including Roscoe, attended a grand dinner at the Athenaeum Club graced by the presence of Prime Minister Arthur Balfour (the then President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science) and the Prince of Wales (later King George V).¹⁰⁵ This was a struggle for prestige, to put eminent scientists on the same social level as peers, generals, and bishops, and to have their views taken at least as seriously. It was also important for the science reformers that the cultural importance of science should be acknowledged in various ways, for example by setting up a national science museum.

While Roscoe probably considered himself to be a “man of the people,” he was not in any sense a populist. In fact, surprisingly often he was in conflict with public opinion. Roscoe was a member of a denomination which denied one of the central tenets of Anglicanism and most nonconformist churches. He supported temperance and tighter control over pubs, which earned him the enmity of publicans (despite having a grandfather who was an innkeeper) and Oscar Wilde’s “drinking classes.” He campaigned for Sunday opening of museums and libraries, which brought him into conflict with the Sabbatarian wing of the nonconformists. He opposed the apprenticeship system, which was popular with most industrial employers and trade unions. He wanted to introduce the compulsory use of the metric system and decimalization, which was anathema to many people; Lord Kelvin’s bill of 1904 led to the setting up of the British Weights and Measures Association. Roscoe supported Irish Home Rule, which was opposed by many of his own constituents. In displaying his fondness for Germany and his approval of German education, Roscoe was rowing against a tide of anti-German feeling in the public at large in the 1880s.¹⁰⁶ Roy MacLeod has urged that there was growing opposition to science itself in the 1880s and 1890s.¹⁰⁷ This was partly a result of the growing strength of anti-vivisectionism in this period, which nearly derailed the foundation of the Lister Institute, and Roscoe helped to hold the line. Clearly, in Roscoe’s view, being right was more important than reflecting public opinion, which he presumably considered to be ill-informed or misled.

What is the relevance of Roscoe to us today? What traces have his activities left on modern British society? At first glance, one might think he had little impact. Although metrication did eventually come about, we still measure our height in feet and inches, drink pints, and drive at 30 mph. The House of Lords has not only survived, but in 2023 still contains hereditary peers and Church of England bishops. Public houses have survived as community meeting places, and apprenticeships are actively promoted by the government as an alternative to higher education. It is in the field of education that we can find his legacy. The Science Museum continues to flourish and now has sister museums in other cities including Manchester. Museums and the British Library are open on Sundays, but relatively few council-run libraries are open on Sunday, and where they are, it is only for a few hours. The number of technical colleges grew rapidly after World War I, but university student numbers remained low. The first major expansion of tertiary education began after the publication of the Robbins Report in 1963, which expanded the number of universities and converted technical colleges into polytechnics. The polytechnics were not on the same level as the Technische Hochschulen in Germany, but a few university-level institutes of science and technology were created, most notably UMIST in Manchester, the ultimate successor of the Manchester Mechanics Institute. The Robbins Report can be considered the culmination of the series of reports on scientific and technical education which began with the Samuelson committee in 1868. Robbins himself was an economist; there were only one scientist (the chemist Patrick Linstead) and one industrialist (Reginald Southall, managing director of BP’s Llandarcy refinery) on his committee. However, university student numbers were still relatively low compared with other Western countries, notably the United States, until the early twenty-first century. While Roscoe would have been gratified by this expansion since his death, he would have probably been disappointed that this expansion was not focused on science and technology degrees, but was across the board. While policy changes to university education have addressed student numbers, the debate over the purpose of university education—whether it is to provide general lifelong skills adaptable to most occupations or a qualification for specific careers and professions—largely remains unresolved.