Otto Theodor Benfey

1925 - 2024

Benfey, Otto Theodor

October 31, 1925 - January 24, 2024

Otto Theodor Benfey died peacefully at Friends Homes Guilford on January 24, 2024, at the age of 98. Ted was a distinguished professor of organic chemistry, a respected historian of science, and a valued guide to generations of students, friends, and colleagues. A pillar in the Guilford College community and a founder of Friendship Friends Meeting, he was the beloved companion of his wife, Rachel Thomas Benfey, for 64 years.

Ted was born on Halloween 1925 in Berlin, Germany, the elder son of Eduard Benfey, Chief Justice of the German Supreme Court of Economic Arbitration, and Lotte Maria Fleischmann Benfey, later a resident of Friends Homes.

With the rise of Nazism, Ted's parents, both of whom were assimilated Jews, sent him to England at age ten to live with close friends of the family, the Mendls. He earned his doctorate degree at University College, London, under the supervision of the British Nobel Prize winner Sir Christopher Ingold. Shocked by the bombing of Hiroshima, Ted became a Quaker in 1946.

Ted's parents received American visas with the help of Lotte's sister, the textile artist Anni Albers, who was teaching at Black Mountain College with her husband, the painter Josef Albers, in western North Carolina. In December 1946 Ted moved to the United States for research at Columbia University, and for forty years, from 1948 to 1988, he taught at the Quaker colleges of Haverford, Earlham, and Guilford, retiring as Dana Professor of Chemistry and History of Science.

At Haverford in 1949 he married the artist and teacher Rachel Elizabeth Thomas, a Guilford College graduate who later founded the pre-school A Child's Garden, now a part of New Garden Friends School. From 1963 to 1978 he was founding editor of the American Chemical Society's educational magazine Chemistry, in which he published, in 1964, his famous spiral design of the periodic table.

After retiring from teaching, Ted and Rachel moved to Philadelphia where he was named editor of publications at the Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry, now the Chemical Heritage Foundation.

Ted and Rachel joined the Friends Homes retirement community in 1996 and resumed their membership in Friendship Friends Meeting. He compiled four volumes of The Experience of War: Residents of Friends Homes Tell Their Stories.

Ted is survived by his sister, Renate Wilkins, his children Stephen (and wife Kikue Kotani), Christopher (and Mickey Rathbun), Karen (and Bobby Boyd), and by Elisabeth Benfey, widow of Ted's son Philip. At the time of his death, he had eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren, a source of pride and delight to him.

Final arrangements are being handled by the Cremation Society of the Carolinas.

A Quaker memorial service will be held in Greensboro later in the spring, with date and location to be determined. In lieu of flowers, gifts would be appreciated for the Rachel Thomas Benfey Fund of New Garden Friends School, 1128 New Garden Road, Greensboro, NC 27410.