Charles Thomas Jackson

Charles Jackson claimed to have invented ether anaesthesia, the telegraph and guncotton, lost every priority dispute he started, and died in an asylum. He was a Boston physician and chemist trained at Harvard and in Paris, and made a genuine career as a geologist, conducting the state surveys of Maine, Rhode Island and New Hampshire and serving as state geologist for the federal survey of the Lake Superior mineral lands. He kept a laboratory and took in students and lodgers. On the ship home from Europe in 1832 he discussed electromagnetism with Samuel Morse, and after Morse's telegraph succeeded he claimed to have given him the idea, which Morse denied and the courts rejected. He claimed the invention of guncotton against Schoenbein. His most damaging claim concerned ether: William Morton, a dentist who had lodged with him, asked him about inhalation agents in 1846 and was told to use sulphuric ether, and after Morton's public demonstration at the Massachusetts General Hospital in October Jackson asserted that the discovery was his and that Morton had merely been a technician. Morton fought him for the rest of his life; Horace Wells claimed it too, and Crawford Long produced evidence of having used ether in Georgia in 1842. Congress considered a prize and never awarded it. Wells killed himself in 1848 and Morton died in 1868 of a stroke during the dispute. Jackson was found deranged at Morton's grave in 1873 and spent his last seven years confined at McLean Asylum. His sister Lydia was Ralph Waldo Emerson's second wife. His geological reports on New England remain useful documents. He is buried at Mount Auburn, in the same cemetery as Morton, whose monument was paid for by Boston physicians and inscribed with the claim Jackson had spent twenty years contesting.

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