Ira Remsen

• Born: February 10, 1846
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: March 4, 1927
• Place of death: Carmel, California

American chemist

Remsen was a distinguished chemistry teacher and a prolific writer of highly regarded textbooks. He is best known for his discovery, with Constantin Fahlberg, of the artificial sweetener saccharin.

Primary field: Chemistry

Primary invention: Saccharin synthesis

Early Life

Ira Remsen (REHM-suhn), the only child of James Vanderbilt Remsen and Rosanna Remsen (neé Secor) to survive childhood, was born in New York City in 1846. When Ira was eight years old, his mother’s health deteriorated and the family moved to a farm in Rockland County. In this rural setting, the boy acquired a lifelong love of the outdoors and a fascination with nature. His mother died just two years later, and he was sent to live with his maternal great-grandparents, James and Elizabeth Demarest. In this home of a scholarly Dutch Reformed pastor and his cultured wife, young Remsen gained a great love for learning, acquired a taste for scripture, and developed a strong sense of honesty. In later years, he recalled his two years with the Demarests as one of the happiest times of his life. While living with them, Remsen attended the local elementary school, but his father wished him to have a richer education, so they returned to New York City.

There Remsen attended public school until, at fourteen, he enrolled at the New York Free Academy, later the College of the City of New York (CCNY). His father wished his son to study medicine, so Remsen left his undergraduate program before completing his degree. He was placed as an assistant to a practicing physician who was also the professor of chemistry at a homeopathic medical school. It was not long before Remsen realized that he needed a much more rigorous program of study to become a skilled medical professional. He convinced his father that he should enroll in Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Though Remsen received his medical degree with honors in 1867, he was not certain about devoting his life and talents to medicine. As a student, he had acquired some chemistry experience, and after a year of what he later called “critical self-appraisal,” he decided that chemistry was his passion. He set off to study with the renowned professors in Germany with their great teaching laboratories.

In Munich, Remsen received valuable training under Jacob Volhard, an analytical chemist of great stature, and he was also able to hear some of Justus Liebigs’s outstanding lectures. Volhard advised Remsen to move to the University of Göttingen, where Remsen was introduced to Fredrich Wöhler. At Göttingen, Remsen worked under the direction of Rudolf Fittig and was awarded a Ph.D. in 1870. Upon graduation, he went with his mentor to the University of Tübingen as his assistant. There he had the opportunity to read extensively and to become completely immersed in the German system of graduate education. During these years, Remsen developed the major themes that would constitute his later work.

Life’s Work

From his earliest days in Germany, Remsen had a keen interest in the subtle chemistry of the derivatives of benzene, which are referred to as “aromatic compounds” because some of the common members have a sweet odor. Benzene was discovered by English physicist Michael Faraday in 1825. Its molecular formula, C₆H₆, suggests great reactivity, yet the compound exhibits extraordinary stability. Remsen knew from his days at Göttingen that a carbon atom attached to benzene could be fully oxidized without changing the benzene. One of the great theoretical problems of early organic (or carbon) chemistry was to explain this marked stability.

In Germany, Remsen worked on the oxidation of xylenes, which possess a benzene ring, of which two carbon atoms are each bonded to a methyl group (CH₃). Later, at the University of Tübingen, he found that methyl groups attached adjacent to a sulfonic acid group (SO₃H) are protected from oxidation. He also found that chains of two or three carbon atoms are similarly protected. This observation has been referred to as Remsen’s law. In addition, Remsen demonstrated that the more complex sulfamide group (SO₂NH₂) also prevents the oxidation of methyl groups. Later, at Johns Hopkins University, he discovered that the oxidizing agent potassium permanganate did allow the adjacent methyl group to be oxidized. In 1879, Remsen suggested to a postdoctoral student, Constantin Fahlberg, that he try this new oxidation method on 2-methylbenzenesulfonamide. This experiment resulted in the most practical invention of Remsen’s career—what Fahlberg later named “saccharin,” a substance three hundred to five hundred times sweeter than sugar.

These laboratory successes pale in comparison to Remsen’s influence on his students. Remsen was one of those rare professors who possessed a genuine talent for impressing on young minds the beauty as well as the principles of science. When he began teaching at Williams College in Massachusetts in 1872, the year he returned from Germany, he was struck by the poor quality of chemistry textbooks in English. His translation of Wöhler’s Outlines of Organic Chemistry was published in 1873. In 1876, while still at the college, he published the first of a series of exceedingly popular textbooks entitled The Principles of Theoretical Chemistry.

The upper-class liberal arts atmosphere at Williams was not consistent with Remsen’s view of scientific education. He was delighted to receive the invitation of Daniel Coit Gilman, the founding president of Johns Hopkins University, to become the institution’s first professor of chemistry. It was the intention of the university to offer graduate education based on the German model, and Remsen was just the man to implement that goal. He served the university from 1876 until his retirement in 1913. In 1901, Gilman resigned, and the board of trustees selected Remsen as the new president. He often alluded to the sense of loss he felt in giving up his teaching role, and his former students saw his administrative duties as a great loss to teaching and to the scientific community. Nevertheless, he worked diligently to promote the university’s mandate and to serve the public interests of Baltimore as well.

One of Remsen’s greatest contributions to the advancement of American chemistry was his founding of the American Chemical Journal in 1879. He was its only editor until the fiftieth volume in 1915. At that point, the journal merged with the Journal of the American Chemical Society, which remains one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals.

Remsen received many honors in his life. In 1903, he served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. From 1907 to 1913, he was president of the National Academy of Sciences. In addition to a number of honorary degrees, Remsen won the gold medal of the Society of Chemical Industry and both the Willard Gibbs (1914) and the Priestley (1923) medals of the American Chemical Society, for which he had served as president in 1902.

Remsen had married Elizabeth Mallory in 1875, and they had two sons, Ira and Charles. After Remsen retired in 1913, he and his wife spent some tranquil years traveling. He died from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1927.

Impact

During his career, Remsen and his graduate students studied a great many chemical reactions, and together they published more than 170 scientific articles. Remsen aimed to elucidate the principles of chemistry rather than to simply produce new compounds or even new reaction pathways. Nevertheless, he is best known for his discovery, with Fahlberg, of the first artificial sweetener, saccharin. Demand in the United States for the synthetic sweetener increased during the sugar shortages of World War I, and the calorie-free substance was a boon to the food and diet industries in later decades. Saccharin is found in low-calorie soft drinks as well as tabletop sweeteners such as Sweet’N Low.

Bibliography

Getman, Frederick H. The Life of Ira Remsen. Reprint. New York: Arno Press, 1980. A detailed, but uncritical, study of Remsen’s life and work by one of his students. Important for the numerous quotations from Remsen’s diaries and commentaries by his students and collaborators. Excellent photographs.

Haake, Paul. “Remsen, Ira.” In American National Biography, edited by John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes. Vol. 18. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. The most up-to-date brief biography on Remsen. Well written and covering all aspects of his life and work. An annotated biographical note offers the location of important materials.

Hawthorne, Robert M., Jr. “Ira Remsen, 1846-1927.” In American Chemists and Chemical Engineers, edited by Wyndham D. Miles. Washington, D.C.: American Chemical Society, 1976. A brief, thoughtful analysis of Remsen together with a quite thorough and critical bibliography of writings about him.

Noyes, William Albert, and James Flack Norris. “Ira Remsen, 1846-1927.” In Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences. Vol. 14. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1931. The most authoritative source on Remsen’s life and career. Contains extensive quotations from his speeches and reminiscences by his collaborators.

Tarbell, D. Stanley, and Ann T. Tarbell. “The Johns Hopkins University, Ira Remsen and Organic Chemistry, 1876-1913.” In Essays on the History of Organic Chemistry in the United States, 1875-1955. Nashville, Tenn.: Folio, 1986. Remsen and Johns Hopkins are so closely intertwined that the story of one must detail both. This chapter is the most careful and scholarly work on Remsen and his contributions to American chemistry. Photographs and detailed documentation.