John Stenhouse - Life

Life

John Stenhouse was born in Glasgow on October 21, 1809. He was the eldest son of William Stenhouse, a calico-printer in Glasgow, and Elizabeth Currie; he was the only one of their children to survive beyond infancy. After graduating from the Glasgow Grammar School, he studied at Glasgow University from 1824 to 1828. Initially he intended to pursue a career in literature, but later his interests switched to chemistry, which he studied first under Professor Thomas Graham at the University and then under Dr. Thomas Thomson at Anderson’s University in Glasgow (now part of the University of Strathclyde, one of whose buildings is named after him). During 1837-1839, he attended the chemical lectures at Glasgow University, whence he left to pursue chemistry research for two years under Justus Liebig at the University of Giessen in Germany. He then returned to Glasgow. In 1841 he was a co-founder of the Chemical Society of London. In 1848 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. He received his LL.D. degree from the University of Aberdeen in 1850.

Hitherto Stenhouse had been living on a fortune that had been left to him by his father; however, in 1850 the Glasgow Commercial Exchange Company failed and his inheritance was lost. He then sought a professorship at Owens College, now the University of Manchester, but was unsuccessful. However, in February 1851 he was appointed Lecturer on Chemistry to the medical school at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London. (August Kekulé (1829-1896), who would become an eminent organic chemist, was one of his laboratory assistants during this time.) In 1857 Stenhouse suffered a stroke, which left him partially paralyzed and forced him to resign his position. He left England to convalesce with his mother in Nice (then still part of Italy) until her death in February 1860. In June of that year he returned to England and opened a laboratory in an outbuilding of an abandoned factory on Rodney Street, King's Cross, London; there he supported himself by assaying, consulting, and performing other contract work. He also recommenced his researches in chemistry, even though he could not perform experiments with his own hands. He hired assistants (mainly graduates from the Royal College of Chemistry) to do the work for him. These assistants included Raphael Meldola (1849-1915), who would become an eminent organic chemist, and Charles E. Groves (1841-1920), who co-authored of many of Stenhouse’s papers, which ultimately numbered in excess of 100.

From 1865 to 1870 he was an assayer to the Royal Mint (where his former professor Thomas Graham was Master of the Mint). In 1871 he received the Royal Medal of the Royal Society for his chemical researches. In 1877 he became a Fellow of the Institute of Chemistry. He died a natural death on December 31, 1880, age 72, at his home in Pentonville, Islington, London and was buried in the High Church New Cemetery in Glasgow.