Poor, Charles Lane

POOR, CHARLES LANE

(b. Hackensack, New Jersey, 18 January 1866; d. New York, N.Y., 27 September 1951)

astronomy.

The son of Edward Eri Lane and Mary Wellington, Lane obtained his undergraduate and part of his graduate education at the City College of New York, receiving a B.S. in 1886 and an M.S. in 1890. He completed his education at the Johns Hopkins University, where he was awarded a Ph.D. in 1892. At Johns Hopkins he studied under Simon Newcomb, who was then chairman of the departments of astronomy and mathematics. Newcomb’s direction led Poor to general studies of comets and to a dissertation on the difficult problem of the orbit and motion of Comet 1889V.

Poor became known not only for his excellent work on comets but also for his polemical stand against relativity theory. He later published many papers and books vehemently criticizing Einstein and his work. The quality of his work on comets won Poor a post on the faculty of Johns Hopkins in 1892. He eventually became head of the department of astronomy and held the position until 1899, when he resigned to take over his father’s cotton factoring business in South Carolina.

In 1903 Poor returned to science as a professor of astronomy at Columbia University, where he remained for the rest of his life, becoming professor emeritus in 1944.

Poor was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. From 1901 to 1906 he was editor of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Many of his personal interests were related to his professional work in astronomy and celestial mechanics. An avid yachtsman, he wrote books on yachting and navigation and also invented numerous navigational instruments.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Poor’s works on comets and planetary studies include “Preliminary Note on the Comet 1889V,” in Astronomical Journal, 14 (1894), 63; The Solar System (New York, 1908); and “Secular Perturbations of the Inner Planets,” in Science, n.s. 54 (1921), 30–34. Some of his works on relativity are Gravitation versus Relativity (New York, 1922); “Relativity: An Approximation,” in Popular Astronomy, 31 (1923), 661;“Relativity and the Motion of Mercury,” in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 29 (1925), 285–319; and “Relativity and the Law of Gravitation,” in Astronomische Nachrichten, 238 (1930), 165–170. Among his books on navigation is Simplified Navigation for Ships and Aircraft (New York, 1918).

II. Secondary Literature. Brief obituaries of Poor are S. A. Mitchell, in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronmical Society, 112 (1952), 279–280; and the unsigned obituaries in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 64 (1952), 48; and New York Herald Tribune (28 Sept. 1951), 22. Poor’s work is mentioned in A. M. Clerke, A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century (London, 1902); and H. S. Williams, The Great Astronomers (New York, 1930).

Richard Berendzen
Richard Hart