biography
| name: |
Smithson, James Louis Macie
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1765–1829)
|
| biography:
| Chemist, and founder of the Smithsonian Institution, born in Paris, France, an illegitimate son of Sir Hugh Smithson Percy, 1st Duke of Northumberland. He studied chemistry and mineralogy at Oxford, and was admitted to the Royal Society at 22. It seems that resentment over the circumstances of his birth led him in 1826 to make the endowment of his fortune, largely inherited from his mother's family, for the founding of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. He wrote that his name should ‘live in the memory of man when the titles of the Northumberlands and Percys are extinct and forgotten’. The Institution was established by an Act of Congress in 1846, and opened in 1855. |
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