His father, Harmon Morse, was a Puritan farmer and a believer in hard work, few holidays and little schooling.

[3] Thanks to an endowment left by his grandmother, Northrop Morse studied chemistry at Amherst College, which he entered in 1869 and graduated in 1873.

He continued his studies in Germany, and obtained a PhD in chemistry with a minor in mineralogy from the University of Göttingen in 1875.

Nevertheless, Wöhler occasionally spent part of his time in the laboratory and a few favored students, generally Americans, were given the privilege of working with him.

When Johns Hopkins University opened in 1876, Morse moved there as an associate of Ira Remsen, thanks in part to a letter of recommendation from Emerson.

[3] Although Johns Hopkins was a research university from the beginning, the early years of the chemistry department were marked by a lack of students and equipment.

With the help of a grant from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, he published a report entitled The Osmotic Pressure of Aqueous Solutions,[10] which summarized the work he performed between 1899 and 1913.

Van 't Hoff derived his analogy based on data from experiments that Wilhelm Pfeffer, a professor of botany, had published a decade earlier under the title "Osmotische Untersuchungen" — an account of his endeavors to measure osmotic pressure by means of porous cells lined with a semipermeable membrane consisting of copper(II)-hexacyanoferrate(II).

Morse showed experimentally that Π = bRT, where b is the molality (mol/kg) yields a better approximation of osmotic pressure.