John Pitkin Norton

John Pitkin Norton (1822 to 1852) was an American educator and agricultural chemist who taught at Yale. Born in Albany, New York, and raised in Farmington, Connecticut, he studied chemistry under Benjamin Silliman at Yale College, then went to Edinburgh in 1844 to study agricultural chemistry with James F. W. Johnston, where he made a study of the oat that was read at the British Association. He toured continental laboratories, visiting Eben Horsford at Giessen, and studied organic chemistry under Gerardus Mulder in Utrecht. Appointed professor of agricultural chemistry at Yale in 1846, he helped found, with Benjamin Silliman Jr., the department of philosophy and the arts that later became the Sheffield Scientific School and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. He wrote Elements of Scientific Agriculture (1850) and many papers on the chemistry of crops, and taught Samuel William Johnson, later one of the country's foremost educators in scientific agriculture. Norton died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty.