The Papers of Joseph Henry

Volume 3, The Princeton Years: January 1836-December 1837 (Washington, 1979: ISBN 0-87474-174-2) focuses on Henry’s travels to the principal scientific centers of Great Britain and France. During his stay, Henry attended lectures at technical societies, and toured lighthouses, harborworks, and railroad facilities. His diary entries contain appraisals of such European luminaries as J. L. Gay-Lussac, Mary Somerville, [...]

Volume 5, The Princeton Years: January 1841-December 1843 (Washington, 1985: ISBN 0-87474-793-7) provides a detailed picture of Henry’s daily life as a college professor and leader of the American scientific community: teaching, experimenting, presenting his results to his peers, and lecturing to the public. In addition to continuing his research on electromagnetism, he investigated such phenomena as [...]

Volume 7, The Smithsonian Years: January 1847-December 1849 (Washington, 1996: ISBN 1-56098-533-X) documents the beginning of the most influential period of Henry’s life, his thirty-one years as Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. During these years, Henry strove to ensure that James Smithson’s bequest was used to support original scientific research and publication, rather than to create a [...]

In 1854 the Smithsonian faced a crisis that threatened to tear the eight-year-old institution apart when Secretary Joseph Henry and Assistant Secretary Charles C. Jewett publicly clashed over its future direction. Before their dispute was settled, battles had been fought at regents’ meetings, in newspapers and literary journals in New York, Boston, and Washington, and [...]

In this final volume of The Papers of Joseph Henry, Henry emerges as the unrivaled leader of American science and the nation’s foremost proponent of funding for basic scientific research. Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution since its founding in 1846, Henry guides its recovery from the Civil War while reshaping it by reducing or eliminating programs [...]