Hunt was born at
Norwich, Connecticut. He lost his father when twelve years old, and had to earn his own livelihood. In the course of two years he found employment in a printing office, in an
apothecary shop, in a book store and as a clerk. He became interested in natural science, and especially in chemical and medical studies, and in 1845 he was elected a member of the Association of American Geologists and Naturalists at Yale—a body which four years later became the
American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1848 he presented a paper in
Philadelphia On Acid Springs and Gypsum Deposits of the Onondaga Salt Group. At Yale he became assistant to
Benjamin Silliman Jr., and in 1846 was appointed chemist to the Geological Survey of Vermont. In 1847 he was appointed to similar duties on the
Geological Survey of Canada in
Montreal under
Sir William Logan, and this post he held until 1872. In the Report of the Geological Survey for 1849-1850, Hunt analyzed a one hundred pound sample of
bitumen from Enniskillen Township, noting that the mineral could be used to create
asphalt,
caulking material for ships or
illuminating gas. Hunt's report drew attention to the bitumen despots in
Southwestern Ontario and helped ignite the first oil boom in
Enniskillen Township. In December 1860, Hunt travelled to the Enniskillen oil fields and recorded that
James Miller Williams and other entrepreneurs had sunk over 100 oils wells and mined somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000 gallons of oil. He resigned to become
professor of
geology at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was elected an Associate Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1851. In 1857, he invented a
chromium oxide-based ink while teaching at
Université Laval, in response to an appeal for measures to fight counterfeiting. The ink ended up being used on various bank notes, including the US government's Civil War bank notes. This is the origin of the term "
Greenback". In 1859 he was elected fellow of the
Royal Society, and he was one of the original members and president of the
Royal Society of Canada. In 1861, he was elected as a member of the
American Philosophical Society. He was made Chevalier or the
Legion of Honor in
France and an honorary doctor of laws of the
University of Cambridge. He was a frequent contributor to scientific journals, writing on the crystalline
limestones, the origin of continents, the chemistry of the primeval earth, on serpentines, etc. He also wrote a notable
Essay on the History of the names Cambrian and Silurian (
Canadian Naturalist, 1872), in which the claims of
Adam Sedgwick, with respect to the grouping of the
Cambrian strata, were forcibly advocated. Building upon
John Tyndall's research on
greenhouse gases, Hunt first proposed the theory which linked
climate change from the
Carboniferous to the modern age to concentrations of
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in an 1863 submission to the
American Journal of Science and Arts. He further explored at a meeting for the British Society for the Advancement of Science in the fall of 1878. This was well before
Arrhenius established the theory of the greenhouse effect. Hunt later hypothesized that the high concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the geologic past was of cosmic, rather than volcanic, origin. He died in
New York City on February 12, 1892. The
Thomas-Sterry-Hunt International Ecological Reserve, an ecological reserve in
Quebec, Canada was established on September 7, 1988. ==Publications==