Benjamin Silliman

Career

Returning to New Haven, he studied its geology. His chemical analysis of a meteorite that fell in 1807 near Weston, Connecticut, was the first published scientific account of an American meteorite. He lectured publicly at New Haven in 1808 and came to discover many of the constituent elements of many minerals. Some time around 1818, Ephraim Lane took some samples of rocks he found at an area called Saganawamps, now a part of the Old Mine Park Archeological Site in Trumbull, to Silliman for identification. Silliman reported in his new American Journal of Science, a publication covering all the natural sciences but with an emphasis on geology, that he had identified tungsten, tellurium, topaz and fluorite in the rocks. He played a major role in the discoveries of the first articulated fossil fishes found in the United States, which he discovered in Newark Supergroup deposits near Connecticut, and were later described as the genera Redfieldius and Semionotus. In 1837, the first prismatic barite ore of tungsten in the United States was discovered at the mine. The mineral sillimanite was named after Silliman in 1850. Upon the founding of the medical school, he also taught there as one of the founding faculty members.

In 1833 he discussed the relationship of Flood geology to the Genesis account and also wrote about this topic in 1840.

Silliman was an early supporter of coeducation in the Ivy League. Although Yale would not admit women as students until over 100 years later, he allowed young women into his lecture classes. His efforts convinced Frederick Barnard, later president of Columbia College, that women ought to be admitted as students. "The elder Silliman, during the entire period of his distinguished career as a Professor of Chemistry, Geology and Mineralogy in Yale College, was accustomed every year to admit to his lecture-courses classes of young women from the schools of New Haven. In that institution the undersigned had an opportunity to observe, as a student, the effect of the practice, similar to that which he afterward created for himself in Alabama, as a teacher. The results in both instances, so far as they went, were good; and they went far enough to make it evident that if the presence of young women in college, instead of being occasional, should be constant, they would be better."

American historian David McCullough mentions in his book about early 19th century Americans in Paris that in 1825 Silliman, while on a tour of Europe conferring with other scientists, encountered his former Yale science student Samuel Morse in the Louvre museum (at that time Morse was still primarily a painter). As professor emeritus, he delivered lectures at Yale on geology until 1855; Silliman had been the first person to use the process of fractional distillation, and, in 1854 his son Benjamin Silliman Jr became the first person to fractionate petroleum by distillation. In 1864 Silliman noted oil seeps in the Ojai, California, area. In 1866, this led to the start of oil exploration and development in the Ojai Basin.

Silliman pioneered the mass production of carbonated water and helped popularize it in the United States. In 1806, he purchased a Nooth apparatus and opened a soda fountain in New Haven. He marketed his mineral waters for their medicinal properties.

Like his son-in-law James Dana, Silliman was a Christian. In an address delivered before the Association of American Geologists he spoke in favor of old Earth creationism, stating:

It is already admitted by multitudes, that the chronology of the Scriptures is, in strictness, applied only to the history of our race, the sole moral beings whom God has placed in this World; while all that precedes man in the creation, is limited, in duration backwards, only by that beginning, whose date is known to no being but the infinite Creator, and which certainly precedes, by many ages, the creation of man.

— Silliman, (1842)

In the same line of thought, he posed arguments against atheism and materialism.

1807 meteor

At 6:30 in the morning of December 14, 1807, a blazing fireball about two-thirds the apparent size of the Moon in the sky, was seen traveling southwards by early risers in Vermont and Massachusetts. Three loud explosions were heard over Weston, Connecticut. Stone fragments fell in at least 6 places. The largest and only unbroken stone, which weighed 36.5 pounds (16.5 kilograms), was found some days after Silliman and Kingsley had spent several fruitless hours hunting for it. The owner, a Trumbull farmer named Elijah Seeley, was urged to present it to Yale by local people who had met the professors during their investigation, but he insisted on putting it up for sale. It was purchased by Colonel George Gibbs for his large and famous collection of minerals; when the collection became the property of Yale in 1825, Silliman finally acquired this stone; the only specimen of the Weston meteorite that remains in the Yale Peabody Museum collection today.

Personal life

His first marriage was on September 17, 1809, to Harriet Trumbull, daughter of Connecticut Governor Jonathan Trumbull Jr. Silliman and his wife had four children: one daughter married Professor Oliver P. Hubbard, another married Professor James Dwight Dana (Silliman's doctoral student until 1833 and assistant from 1836 to 1837); and youngest daughter Julia married Edward Whiting Gilman, brother of Yale graduate and educator Daniel Coit Gilman. His son Benjamin Silliman Jr., also a professor of chemistry at Yale, wrote a report that convinced investors to back George Bissell's seminal search for oil. His second marriage was in 1851 to Mrs. Sarah Isabella (McClellan) Webb, daughter of John McClellan. Silliman died at New Haven in 1864 and is buried in Grove Street Cemetery.

Legacy

Silliman deemed slavery an "enormous evil". According to Yale historian David Blight, Silliman received a research assignment in 1833 to study the sugar plantations of Louisiana. Despite his aversion to slavery, he was nevertheless influenced by the hypocrisy that reigned at the time on the issue, understandable when one considers that most of the college's founders, faculty, and administrators, including himself, were slave owners. He told a colleague who was about to leave on a study mission: "Open your eyes and ears to every fact connected with the actual condition of slavery everywhere – but do not talk about it – hear and see everything but say little". He favored colonization of free African Americans in Liberia, serving as a board member of the Connecticut Colonization Society between 1828 and 1835. He was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1813, and an Associate Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1815. Silliman founded and edited the American Journal of Science, and was appointed one of the corporate members of the National Academy of Sciences by the United States Congress. He was also a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Silliman College, one of Yale's residential colleges, is named for him, as is the mineral Sillimanite. In Sequoia National Park, Mount Silliman is named for him, as is Silliman Pass, a creek and two lakes below the summit of Mount Silliman.

The standard author abbreviation Silliman is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.