James Smithson

• Born: 1765
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: June 27, 1829
• Place of death: Genoa, Kingdom of Sardinia (now in Italy)

British chemist

Smithson, a British chemist who never visited the United States, nevertheless bequeathed a portion of his estate to establish a museum in Washington, D.C., which would eventually become the Smithsonian Institution.

Sources of wealth: Inheritance; investments

Bequeathal of wealth: Relatives; educational institution

Early Life

James Smithson (SMIHTH-suhn) was born in Paris, most likely in 1765, as James Lewis Macie, the illegitimate son of Hugh Smithson, who later became the first duke of Northumberland, and the widowed Elizabeth Keate Hungerford Macie, an ambitious woman whose first husband, John Macie, was dead when her son was born. The personal estate that John Macie left his wife formed part of the wealth she eventually left her son, although her constant litigation over her property decreased its value over the years. Her estate at probate was valued at less than £10,000. Smithson, who deeply felt the circumstances of his birth, successfully petitioned the Crown to take his father’s name after his mother’s death in 1800, a move he had contemplated for some time.

In 1782, Smithson entered Pembroke College, Oxford University. In 1784, he undertook his first scientific expedition, a geological tour that included visits to Oban, Staffa, and the Western Isles of Scotland, accompanied by two aeronautics experts, Barthélemy Faujas de Saint Fond and Count Paolo Andreani, where he recorded journal observations on mining and manufacturing processes. He received an honorary master of arts degree from Pembroke in May, 1786.

First Ventures

Smithson, who never married, was trained as a chemist, and much of his professional work was undertaken on the European continent against the turmoil of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. His life was essentially that of the bachelor scientist who spent considerable time in scientific research and exploration, notably in chemistry, mineralogy, and geology. During his life, he lived in cities as diverse as Berlin, Florence, Geneva, and Rome, where he spent much of his later years as his health worsened. His schooling and interests afforded him the opportunity to mix with many noted scientists who valued him for his chemical analyses of minerals, which he published in the Royal Society of London’s Philosophical Transactions and later in the Annals of Philosophy: Or, Magazine of Chemistry, Mineralogy, Mechanics, Natural History, Agriculture, and the Arts, published by Thomas Thomson. Smithson’s research included the chemical content of a lady’s teardrop, the crystalline form of ice, and an improved method of making coffee, while his work and travels brought him into contact with all of the premier scientists of the period, including Sir Joseph Banks, Sir Humphry Davy, and Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier.

Smithson, along with many of his friends, was an active member of several organizations dedicated to advancing scientific research and using science to benefit society. He and his friend Henry Cavendish, a noted chemist and physicist, were fellows of the Royal Society of London, England’s oldest and most prestigious scientific society, and charter members of the Royal Institution of Great Britain.

In 1802, Smithson overturned popular scientific opinion by proving that zinc carbonates were true carbonate minerals, not zinc oxides. One calamine, the mineral ZnCO₃, a type of zinc carbonate, was named smithsonite after him in 1832. Smithsonite was a principal source of zinc until the 1880’s.

Mature Wealth

Smithson and his brother Henry Louis Dickinson, also fathered by the duke of Northumberland, inherited a considerable estate from their mother’s family, but Smithson’s real fortune came upon his mother’s death in May, 1800. In July, he sold £13,350 of the Bank of England’s 5 percent annuities and reinvested his proceeds in exchequer bills. This supplemented his own shrewd investments in relatively safe, blue-chip Bank of England investments, including the Bank of England’s 3 and 5 percent annuities, India bonds, and others.

He now used his increased fortune to bankroll technological innovations that promoted the economic strength of England. One of his first and most successful investments was the Grand Junction Canal, which was constructed to ship goods from Birmingham to London and opened in 1801. The canal immediately showed a return on his investment, and Smithson continued to receive dividends from it for all of his life. He also received profits from the New Croydon Canal and from one of its biggest competitors, the Surrey Iron Railway, which carried goods from the Thames at Wandsworth south through Colliers Wood to Croydon. An 1801 act of Parliament made the Surrey Iron Railway the first railroad independent of a canal, and Smithson purchased several hundred pounds’ worth of stock in order to fund the project.

It is not possible to gain a complete picture of Smithson’s finances from the official bank records that remain, since in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when Great Britain was engaged in many wars, investors did not confine their holdings to one place. Smithson’s records at Hoare’s Bank, and his subsequent account at Drummond’s Bank, probably reflect only a small portion of his financial dealings, but they demonstrate his active interest in his portfolio. He took a small inheritance from his mother and, through a lifetime of shrewd investment and management, turned it into the fortune that he eventually bequeathed to the United States.

Smithson died in Genoa on June 27, 1829, after a long illness. He was buried in the English church there until the demolition of its cemetery in 1903. The next year, Smithsonian regent Alexander Graham Bell brought Smithson’s remains to Washington, D.C., where they were interred in a tomb in the Smithsonian Institution’s original building.

Legacy

Smithson’s will contained one of the nineteenth century’s greatest endowments. In this testament, written in his own hand and dated October, 23, 1826, Smithson left the bulk of his estate to his nephew, Henry James Hungerford. Upon his nephew’s death without children, legitimate or illegitimate, a contingency clause stated that “the whole of my property,” estimated at more than $500,000, would go to “the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge among men.” Smithson’s library, consisting of 115 titles, totaling about 250 individual volumes, survived a fire in the Smithsonian Institution in 1865. By the twenty-first century, the collection was part of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries.

Historians have long debated the reason behind Smithson’s bequest to a country he never visited. One repeated theory is that the donation was a chance to gain revenge against his father’s family, and consequently the British nobility, for the circumstances of his birth. Smithson once swore that his name would live on in the memory of men when the titles of the Northumberlands and the Percys were extinct or forgotten, but at the time of his death, the Northumberlands were thriving. However, by taking the Smithson name, his father’s name when he was a mere baronet from Yorkshire, Smithson highlighted his own illegitimacy in a period when name meant everything in British society. This pursuit of both name and property, the impetus for Smithson’s lifelong search for a successful financial legacy, as well as his pursuit of knowledge as a chemist, the most exacting of all eighteenth century sciences, ensured that his own name added some luster to the family pantheon. This seems to be the most feasible reason for the establishment of a scientific institution, with the name Smithson, in the United States.

Bibliography

Burleigh, Nina. The Stranger and the Statesman: James Smithson, John Quincy Adams, and the Making of America’s Greatest Museum, the Smithsonian. New York: Morrow, 2003. First major attempt to focus on the establishment of the museum and describe how Smithson’s bequest was nearly lost because of fierce battles among many clashing Americans, who argued over whether a gift from an Englishman should even be accepted.

Ewing, Heather P. The Lost World of James Smithson: Science, Revolution, and the Birth of the Smithsonian. New York: Bloomsbury, 2007. In this well-researched biography that should be considered the definitive rendition of Smithson’s life, the author attempts to clarify many of the misconceptions about Smithson.

Smithson, James. The Scientific Writings of James Smithson. Edited by William J. Rhees. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1879. Compilation volume that includes a memoir on the scientific character and research of James Smithson, written by Walter R. Johnson (pages 123-141), along with papers and articles from the Philosophical Transactions and Annals of Philosophy.