Italia Felix

Forgotten names in the history of science

1

       Charles Blanchford Mansfield

(1819 - 25 February 1855)

Christian Socialist and Chemist

 
             
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Orchid page		     Mansfield was born at a Hampshire parsonage. At school at Winchester he showed an early fondness for mechanical science, but intensely suffered the brutal public school life. After Winchester he went to Cambridge University (Clare Hall) where he made an impression by his generosity and moral honesty. At this time he became a vegetarian, often subsisting merely on a plate of lentils, giving his savings to the poor. As a close friend of Charles Kingsley, he became part of the Christian Socialists who gathered around Frederick Denison Maurice. In 1852-53 he visited South-America, where he felt both elated with the beauty of the tropics and pained by the amount of poverty, disease and waste he witnessed.

Mansfield was interested in ornithology, geology and mesmerism, and worked seriously on chemistry. Faraday had discovered benzene (C6H8) in 1825, but it was Mansfield who discovered a process to produce it with ease. His process to distill benzene was originally used in combustive oil lamps, for dissolving rubber, and in the dye industry. Nowadays it is still used to make drugs, explosives, plastics, and photographic chemicals.

During one of his experiments to perfect the distillation process of benzene, a still boiled over. In an attempt to save his servant, Mansfield caught fire and died after nine days of agony.

 

Sources:

C. B. Mansfield, Paraguay, Brazil, and the Plate (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1856)

J.M.I. Klaver, The Apostle of the Flesh (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2006)