Born in Buffalo NY in 1855, he studied chemistry at Heidelberg under Robert Bunsen (1811-1899) and at Berlin under August Wilhelm Hofmann (1818-1892). He then studied under Adolphe Wurtz (1817-1884) in Paris and Dimitri Ivanoviè Mendeleev (1834-1907) in St Petersburg, but never bothered to take a degree. He was made Professor of Chemistry at Tufts College near Boston. In 1889, he married one of his most brilliant students, Helen Cecilia DeSilver Abbott (1857-1904), one of the few women organic chemists in this period. After a failed attempt to run the chemistry department at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1891, he spent three years working with his wife in his private laboratory on the Isle of Wight before returning to Tufts. After he retired from Tufts in 1907, Michael set up another private laboratory at Newton Center near Boston. In 1912 he was appointed a Professor of Chemistry, without lecturing duties, at Harvard University. Arthur Michael died in 1942.