THE DEPARTMENT OF CHEMISTRY
EXPERIMENTAL sciences were given a place in the curriculums of University studies with the nomination of Douglass Houghton to a combined professorship of chemistry, geology, and mineralogy in 1839, but actual teaching of chemistry was deferred until 1844, when Silas H. Douglass* 1.1 became an assistant to the Professor of Chemistry. At this time instruction in chemistry comprised lectures and quizzes only. Laboratory work was initiated shortly after Henry P. Tappan became President of the University in 1852. Mainly, it consisted of chemical analyses and their applications to toxicology and to other subjects, chiefly medical. Hence it was fitting that quarters for the work should be in the old Medical Building, known at that time as the "Laboratory Building." The plans for this structure had been drawn by Silas Douglass, who also superintended its erection. The immediate success of the practical course and of Douglass' persistent effort to procure a separate building for chemistry led to the inclusion of a request for a chemical laboratory building in the President's Report to the Regents in December, 1855.
The following spring, funds were appropriated for the erection of "a convenient building for the experiments and instruction in analytical chemistry," and Douglass was again made superintendent of construction. Thus was erected in 1856 the first chemical laboratory building of a state university, at a total cost of about six thousand dollars for building and equipment. It was a one-story structure containing three rooms and was equipped with twenty-six laboratory tables. Probably the original chemistry building, then called the Chemical Laboratory of the University of Michigan, was the first structure on the North American continent that was designed, erected, and equipped solely for instruction in chemistry. Other older American chemical laboratories, such as the quarters used by Professor Benjamin Silliman at Yale University, the laboratory of Dr. Robert Hare in Philadelphia, and the laboratories for instruction of students in chemistry and in physics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, were not designed and erected for the purpose,