James Bryant Conant, 26 March 1893 - 11 February 1978

Abstract

James Bryant Conant was born on 26 March 1893 in the town of Dorchester, Massachusetts; he was the youngest child in the family, having two much older sisters. In 1880, shortly after their marriage, his parents, James Scott Conant and Jennet Bryant Conant, had moved to Dorchester from Joppa Village in the county of Plymouth, a town some 40 miles southeast of Boston, that had been the residence of the Bryant and the Conant families for generations. Grandfather Bryant was an outspoken Yankee Republican who, to the great distress of his family, became a Democrat in his old age. He owned a prosperous farm, and a shoe factory nearby, in which he manufactured more than 200 000 pairs of shoes for the Union army in the Civil War, proudly stamping his own name on every shoe as a ‘warranty of quality’. By contrast, the Conant family was poor, James’s grandfather working as a shoe cutter in the Bryant factory. Fortunes changed with the passage of time and the Bryant grandparents spent their old age as guests in the Conants’ spacious Dorchester household, where the elder Bryant’s Democratic politics conflicted sharply with the Conants’ Republican principles. James’s father served in the ranks of the Union Army and Navy in the Civil War, but he saw no action. Afterwards for a time he was a successful developer in Dorchester, which was a low income suburb, where he built utilitarian twoand three-family houses. Later he started a small wood-engraving company, and maintained the profession of engraver thereafter. The invention of the half-tone reproduction process, and its introduction into the printing business, confronted the senior Conant with the need to learn the complicated procedures required for etching copper plates and, although he totally lacked any previous contact with chemistry, he soon added the preparation and developing of wet photographic plates to his chemical techniques. The business prospered, and fortuitously introduced James to chemistry.