Armsby, Henry Prentiss

Extract

Armsby, Henry Prentiss (21 September 1853–19 October 1921), agricultural chemist, was born in Northbridge, Massachusetts, the son of Lewis Armsby, an artisan and cabinetmaker, and Mary A. Prentiss. He attended the common schools of Whitinsville and Millbury and was interested in chemical experiments from an early age. Armsby graduated in 1871 with a B.S. from Worcester County Free Institute of Industrial Science (later Worcester Polytechnic Institute), where he was subsequently an instructor in chemistry from 1871 to 1872. As a postgraduate he specialized in analytical chemistry and spent two periods at Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School, from which he received a Ph.B. in 1874 and a Ph.D. in 1879. In the meantime, and after a year as a teacher at Fitchburg High School in Massachusetts, he had gone to Germany in 1875 to study animal nutrition with the University of Leipzig’s leading agricultural scientists and with Julius Kühn and his colleagues at nearby Möckern Agricultural Experiment Station, Germany’s oldest agricultural experiment station. It was there that Emil von Wolff had begun his pioneering research into agricultural chemistry in 1851....