Robert Hare Papers , American Philosophical Society

Personal and professional correspondence of the chemist, Robert Hare, including drafts of letters to editors of journals on such varied topics as fish guano, slaughterhouses, paper money, and the meaning of the term Yankee annexations. The collection originally contained over 300 scrolls, since disbound, which contained drafts of letters, essays, and lectures, composed by Hare on ordinary sheets of paper, then pasted end to end, and rolled up. The essay and lecture topics include: chemistry, storms, slavery, currency, fire-fighting, capital punishment, railroads, Smithsonian Institution, Michael Faraday, religion and Spiritualism, riots in Philadelphia, epidemics, underwater blasting, and Ralph W. Emerson; there is some verse. The collection also contains an account book of Hare and his wife, 1806-1829 (180 pp.; B/H22#3); a volume by Hare on Cyclones (tornadoes), n.d. (ca. 60 pp.; B/H22#4); and Samuel Powel, Jr.'s "Short notes on a course of antiquities at Rome... under M. Byre Antiquarian," 1764. (60 pp.).

Background note

The great chemist, Robert Hare recalled being dandled on the knee of George Washington, an event that seems to have remained in his mind as he grew older, tying him to the fate of his nation and to his position on the privileged end of the social hierarchy. Hare was born in Philadelphia in 1781, the son of Robert Hare, Sr., a major Philadelphia brewer, and Margaret Willing, and nephew of Thomas Willing, the political leader and president of the Bank of North America.

As a young man, Hare attended the Academy of the University of Pennsylvania, the highest level of formal education he would receive. Possessed of an innate mechanical aptitude, at Penn, Hare developed a passion for chemistry while attending the lectures of James Woodhouse, and in later years the pairing of instrumental and intellectual prowess made him one of the foremost chemical experimentalists and technical innovators in the nation.

Before he turned 20, Hare had begun to experiment toward a method of generating higher temperatures than possible in contemporary furnaces, adapting a keg from his father's brewery to develop an instrument he called the hydrostatic blow-pipe - the oxyhydrogen blowtorch. The blow-pipe proved invaluable in fusing previously infusable metals such as platinum, and, when used by Thomas Drummond to ignite calcium hydroxide- lime - was found to produce a keg from his father's brewery to develop an instrument he called the hydrostatic blow-pipe - the oxyhydrogen blowtorch. The blow-pipe proved invaluable in fusing previously infusable metals such as platinum, and, when used by Thomas Drummond to ignite calcium hydroxide- lime - was found to produce a remarkably bright light that became the preferred medium for lighthouses and the stage. The small pamphlet that Hare wrote to describe his invention, Memoir on the Supply and Application of the Blow-Pipe... (Philadelphia: Chemical Society, 1802), brought him international renown when it was republished in the prestigious English Philosophical Magazine and the French Annales de Chimie. Largely on the strength of this single invention, Hare was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1803 and was awarded an honorary medical degree by Yale in 1806.

Still barely in his majority, Hare continued to work for his father's brewery, devising new, tighter kegs and a modified stop cock on the job. In 1809, the availability of the chair at the University of Pennsylvania vacanted by the death of Joseph Woodward opened an opportunity for Hare to turn his full attention to the subject he loved. After he was denied the appointment for lack of a medical degree, Benjamin Rush intervened to persuade the trustees to create a new position in the Medical School in Natural Philosophy. In 1810, Hare accepted, but since his course was listed only as an elective, he had few matriculants, and resigned two years later due to the lack of remuneration.

Returning to his father's brewery, Hare entered into a bleak period. Assuming full managerial responsibilities for the brewery following his father's death, Hare ran into financial ruin during the economic chaos of the War of 1812. His efforts to make a living at selling gases and running a druggist's concern in Providence, Rhode Island (where his wife's family resided), were unavailing, but his fortunes changed in 1818, when William and Mary College offered him a position as Professor of Natural Philosophy and later that same year, when the Medical School at University of Pennsylvania appointed him as Professor of Chemistry. He returned to Philadelphia and remained at the University for almost thirty years.

As an instructor, Hare was at his best with advanced students but was generally appreciated for his dramatic demonstrations of chemical principles, often employing apparatus he had developed himself. His Compendium of the Course of Chemical Instruction (Philadelphia: Auner, 1828) went through at least four editions before 1840, and is considered one of the most thorough chemical textbooks in antebellum America. Although he taught chemistry to an immense number of medical students, his greatest contributions to his field were as an experimentalist and an innovator in the production of chemical apparatus. Among his most important inventions were the calorimeter (1819), the deflagrator (1821) for producing powerful electrical currents, the litrameter for measuring the specific gravity of fluids, a hydrostatic balance, a cryophorus, and a gas density balance. He was also responsible for isolating elemental boron and silicon, becoming the first American to produce metallic calcium, and was an active researcher in electrical theory and the devising of electrical apparatus. He donated his equipment to the fledgling Smithsonian Institution in 1849, only to have them destroyed by fire years later.

Hare, however, was never simply a chemist. He wrote poetry and fiction (Standish the Puritan,1850, and Overling; or, The Heir of Wycherly, 1852), and was a die hard, politically conservative controversialist, describing himself as a "Washington Federalist" well into the 1850s. Beginning with his Defence of the American Character, or, An Essay on Wealth as an Object of Cupidity or the Means of Distinction in the United States (Philadelphia: s.n., 1819), a work that first appeared in the Federalist Port Folio, Hare wrote frequently on banking, finance, currency, tariff, and social order, almost always assailing those principles he identified as "Jeffersonian" or as leading to social-leveling.

Hare was not loath to participate in discussions of the major social issues of his day, including the abolition of slavery and the clash between capital and labor. A firm believer in social hierarchy, he considered himself an antislavery man, though advocating that freed slaves be relegated to a circumscribed subordinate status in American society and compensating slave owners for any losses they incurred. Importing freedmen to the north, he reasoned, would be beneficial to the former slaves - enabling them to be in closer contact with greater numbers of whites - but also financially beneficial to the northern community as a steady supply of cheap labor, and his fear of servile insurrection - creating the grounds for another Haiti - led him to adopt an authoritarian stance toward his social inferiors.

Never backing away from scientific controversy, Hare waded in to meteorology with an argument that tornadoes were the product of electrical currents in the atmosphere. Most famously, however, in 1854, he took on the task of testing Michael Faraday's theory that Spiritualist table-tilting was the product of involuntary muscular actions. Ever an ingenious mechanic, Hare developed an apparatus he called the Spiritoscope, designed to detect mediumistic fraud, and in the process of testing his machine, he became a Spiritualist convert. His undeniable scientific credentials made him a particularly fortunate believer for the movement, and with the publication of his book, Experimental Investigation of the Spirit Manifestations... (N.Y.: Partridge and Brittan, 1855), Hare became one of the best known Spiritualists in the nation. Concomitantly, he drew the full wrath of the movement's adversaries. After a public lecture defending Spiritualist investigation before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he drew calls for his expulsion from the organization, which appears only to have caused Hare to become more retrenchant in his views. Among Spiritualists, he was no less controversial. Never an orthodox religionist, his apparent agnosticism or atheism proved as unpalatable as it did to non-Spiritualists. Nevertheless, he went to his grave a firm belief in spirit intercourse. He died in May, 1858, leaving behind his wife, Harriett Clark, and six children.

Scope and content

The Robert Hare Papers comprise the bulk of the surviving personal and professional correspondence of the great experimental chemist, Robert Hare, consisting.

Though weak in documenting Hare's early career, the correspondence provides some key insights into his work from the early 1820s through mid-1840s, and more importantly, fleshes out the intellectual context in which Hare operated.

The Hare collection is organized into two series:

Series I Correspondence, 1764-1858 (6 boxes, 1.5 linear feet)
Series II Scrolls, ca.1845-1858 (6 boxes, 1.5 linear feet)

The collection also contains an account book kept by Hare and his wife (180 pp., 1806-1829; B H22 no.3) and a volume by Hare on cyclones (ca. 60 pp., n.d.; B H22 no.4).

Administrative information

Restrictions

None.

Provenance

Acquired 1961, 1975, 1980.

Preferred citation

Cite as: Robert Hare Papers, American Philosophical Society.

Additional information

Related material

The Hare-Willing Papers (Ms. Coll. 6) contain the correspondence of Hare's family and descendants, including some of notebooks of Hare's and additional correspondence. Hare appears as a correspondent in several other collections, including the Joseph Henry Papers, the Letters of Scientists, the C.L. Bonaparte Papers, and the John Torrey Papers.

The Printed Materials Department contains over 100 publications of Hare's from all periods of his career.

The Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania Library contains miscellaneous materials from Hare (see Ms. Coll. 74), along with a thorough collection of his printed works.

References

Edgar Fahs Smith, The Life of Robert Hare: an American Chemist(Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1917). Call no.:B H22s