John Addison Porter

American physician and chemist (1822–1866)

John Addison Porter (March 15, 1822 – August 25, 1866) was an American professor of chemistry and physician. He is the namesake of the John Addison Porter Prize and was a founder of the Scroll and Key senior society of Yale University.

Porter was born in Catskill, New York. Porter graduated from Yale College in 1842. At Yale, he, along with William Kingsley, publisher of The New Englander, and eleven others, founded the senior or secret society Scroll and Key and incorporated the Kingsley Trust Association in 1841. He and moved to Philadelphia for further study. In 1844 he became a professor at Delaware College and remained there until 1847 when he moved to Germany to study at the University of Giessen under Justus von Liebig. He remained at Yale until he had to resign for health reasons in 1864, two years before his death in New Haven. when he served in that capacity to William McKinley.

First book of chemistry and allied sciences. 1857
Principles of chemistry. 1857, 1860, 1864, 1868
First book of science. 1858
Outlines of the first course of Yale agricultural lectures. 1860
Selections from the Kalevala, the Great Finnish Epic. 1868

Porter was the first person to translate any part of the Finnish national epic Kalevala into English using the German translation by Franz Anton Schiefner (the same version used by John Martin Crawford for his complete 1888 translation).

The John Addison Porter Prize, established in 1872, is a prize at Yale University awarded annually to the best work of scholarship in any field "where it is possible, through original effort, to gather and relate facts or principles, or both, and to present the results in such a literary form as to make the product of general human interest."