User:Charles Matthews/Gilbert, Joseph Henry

Gilbert, SIR Joseph Henry (1817–1901), agricultural chemist, born at Hull on 1 Aug. 1817, was one of four sons of Joseph Gilbert [q.v.], a congregational minister, by his wife Ann Taylor [see GILBERT, Mrs. ANN]. The family removed in 1825 to Nottingham, where Gilbert spent his boyhood. He was educated at a school at Mansfield, and in 1838 entered the University of Glasgow, specialising in analytical chemistry under Professor Thomas Thomson [q.v.]. A gun-shot accident in 1832, which caused the loss of one eye, impaired his general health for some time. He next worked at University College, London, in the laboratory of Professor Anthony Todd Thomson [q.v.], where he had as a fellow-student John Bennet Lawes, with whom he was afterwards closely connected. In 1840 he went to Giessen, where he met Lyon Playfair and Augustus Voelcker [q.v.], worked in the laboratory of Liebig, and took the degree of doctor of philosophy. On his return from Giessen he acted in 1840–1 as assistant to Anthony Thomson at University College, and then devoted some time at Manchester to the chemistry of calico printing and dyeing.

On 1 June 1843 he joined as technical adviser John Bennet Lawes, who had shortly before started the first organised agricultural experiment station in the world at his ancestral home at Rothamsted; Gilbert lived at Harpenden close to the laboratory. From June 1843 to August 1900, when Lawes died, the two investigators lived in unbroken friendship and collaboration. ‘What was Lawes' work was Gilbert's work; the two are indissolubly connected. … Lawes was essentially the practical agriculturist. … Gilbert on the other hand was possessed of indomitable perseverance, combined with extreme patience and careful watching of results. With the determination to carry out an experiment to the very close, he united scrupulous accuracy and attention to detail. Each of the partners had his own sphere, and the influence of the two minds, in themselves essentially different, materially contributed to the success which attended their joint efforts, and made the Rothamsted experiments a standard for reference, and an example wherever agricultural research is attempted’ (Dr. J. A. VOELCKER in Journal Royal Agricult. Soc. 1901, lxii. 348, 350).

Gilbert took an active part in the proceedings of various learned societies. He joined the Chemical Society in 1841, a few weeks after its formation, and became its president in 1882–3. He was admitted into the Royal Society in 1860, and received with Lawes its royal medal in 1867. He was elected in 1883 an honorary member of the Royal Agricultural Society, in the ‘Journal’ of which many of the results of the Rothamsted researches were published. In 1884 he was appointed Sibthorpian professor of rural economy at the University of Oxford, and held the professorship for six years, the full term allowed by the statute. In 1893 he went to the Chicago exhibition, and delivered in the United States seven lectures on the Rothamsted experiments. In 1894 Lawes and he were presented by the Prince of Wales at Marlborough House with the Albert gold medal of the Royal Society of Arts. He received honorary degrees from the universities of Glasgow (LL.D. 1883), Oxford (M.A. 1884), Edinburgh (LL.D. 1890), and Cambridge (Sc.D. 1894).

On the completion of fifty years of the joint labours of Lawes and Gilbert, a granite memorial of the event was dedicated at Rothamsted on 29 June 1893, and Gilbert was presented with an address and a piece of plate. On 11 Aug. 1893 he received the honour of knighthood. His activity of mind and body continued almost to the last, but the death of Lawes in 1900 was a great blow to him. He died at Harpenden on 23 Dec. 1901, in his eighty-fifth year, and was buried in the churchyard there close to the grave of Lawes.

Gilbert married twice: (1) in 1850, Eliza Laurie (d 1853); (2) in 1855, Maria Smith, who survived him and was granted a civil list pension of 100l. in 1904. He had no family by either marriage. His portrait in oils, painted by Frank O. Salisbury in 1900, hangs in the directors' room at the laboratory at Rothamsted. Sources

Memoir (with portrait) by Dr. J. A. Voelcker in vol. 62 (1901) of the Journal Royal Agricult. Soc. of England; obit. notice by Robert Warington, F.R.S., in Proc. Roy. Soc. lxxv. 236–242; Trans. Chemical Soc., 1902, p. 625; Nature, 2 Jan. 1902; personal knowledge.

E. C.