Mason Science College was founded by Josiah Mason in 1875 and its building in Edmund Street, Birmingham, England, was opened by Thomas Henry Huxley on 1 October 1880. In 1900 it was incorporated into the new University of Birmingham.
Notable alumni include:
- Francis William Aston, British chemist and physicist who won the 1922 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- Neville Chamberlain, British Prime Minister.
- Stanley Baldwin, British Prime Minister.
- Sir Henry Fowler, locomotive engineer
- C.W. Hobley, pioneering colonial administrator in Kenya
- Frank Horton FRS Professor of Physics at Royal Holloway College and Vice-Chancellor of the University of London 1939-45
- Henry Eliot Howard, ornithologist
- Constance Naden, Poet & Philosopher
- John Berry Haycraft discovered an anticoagulant created by the leech, which he named hirudin
The original Victorian Neo-Gothic building was demolished in 1962, along with the original Central Public Library and the Birmingham and Midland Institute, as part of the redevelopment within the inner ring road. The current Central Library stands on the site of the old college.
Famous quotes containing the words science and/or college:
“The science hangs like a gathering fog in a valley, a fog which begins nowhere and goes nowhere, an incidental, unmeaning inconvenience to passers-by.”
—H.G. (Herbert George)
“I had a classmate who fitted for college by the lamps of a lighthouse, which was more light, we think, than the University afforded.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)