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:
“I exulted like “a pagan suckled in a creed” that had never been worn at all, but was brand-new, and adequate to the occasion. I let science slide, and rejoiced in that light as if it had been a fellow creature. I saw that it was excellent, and was very glad to know that it was so cheap. A scientific explanation, as it is called, would have been altogether out of place there. That is for pale daylight.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)