The 1920s: Science and Technology: Deaths

THE 1920s: SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY: DEATHS

Frank Stephen Baldwin, 86, inventor of Baldwin calculator and other calculating machines, 8 April 1925.

Edward E. Barnard, 66, first astronomer to combine the camera and the telescope, taking photographs of plants, comets, nebulae, and the Milky Way, 6 February 1923.

Alexander Graham Bell, 75, inventor of the telephone, 2 August 1922.

Emile Berliner, 78, inventor of the microphone, the disk phonograph record, and the first workable helicopter, 3 August 1929.

Hezekiah Bissel, 93, the only engineer with the Union Pacific Railroad to see the construction of the trans-continental railway from start to finish (1862-1869), 23 June 1928.

Bertram B. Boltwood, 57, chemist and physicist who researched the properties of the radioactive elements uranium and thorium, discovering ionium, an isotope of thorium, and pioneering radioactive dating of geological strata, 15 August 1927.

Charles Francis Brush, 80, pioneer in methods of electric lighting, inventor of Brush electric arc light system used on the streets of Cleveland, Ohio, and New York City, 15 June 1929.

Luther Burbank, 77, botanist, the father of modern plant breeding, 11 April 1926.

John Hoffman Dunlap, 41, inventor of the diagonal-jet drinking fountain, which replaced the less-sanitary vertical-jet fountain, 29 July 1924.

George Washington Goethals, 69, chief engineer in charge of the construction of the Panama Canal (1907-1914), 21 January 1928.

Granville Stanley Hall, 80, widely regarded as the founder of educational and child psychology, 24 April 1924.

John Fillmore Hayford, 56, engineer who developed the theory of isostasy, which states that the surface materials of the Earth are so distributed as to exert an overall even pressure on the interior of the planet, 10 March 1925.

John Wesley Hyatt, 82, inventor of composition billiard ball, water filter and purifier, roller bearing, lock-stitch sewing machine, and celluloid, 10 May 1920.

Henrietta Swan Leavitt, 53, astronomer who found that Cepheid-variable stars—those with regular periods (cycles of fluctuation in brightness)—have periods proportional to their absolute magnitude (that is, the brighter the star the longer its period), a factor important in measuring the distance of such stars from Earth, 12 December 1921.

Jacques Loeb, 64, physiologist who conducted groundbreaking experiments on tropisms, parthogenic reproduction, and regeneration in lower animals, 11 February 1924.

Hudson Maxim, 74, explosives inventor, 6 May 1927.

James Mooney, 60, ethnologist with the Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology, best known for his study of the Cherokee, Kiowa, and Sioux tribes, 22 December 1921.

Edward W. Morley, 85, chemist who worked with Albert Michelson on ether experiments, 24 February 1923.

Raphael Pumpelly, 85, geologist, first professor of mining at Harvard University and author of the survey of U.S. mineral resources for the 1880 census, 10 August 1923.

Ira Remsen, 81, chemist, codiscoverer of saccharin, 4 March 1927.

Theodore William Richards, 60, winner of the 1914 Nobel Prize for chemistry for his determination of the atomic weights of sixty elements, 2 April 1928.

John Martin Schaeberle, 71, astronomer and engineer who invented instruments to improve astronomical observations, 17 September 1924.

Charles Proteus Steinmetz, 58, electrical engineer whose studies of alternating current (AC) helped to make its use commercially feasible, 26 October 1923.

Edward Bradford Titchener, 60, a leader of the structuralist school of psychologists, who helped to establish the scientific basis of his field, author of the two-volume Experimental Psychology (1901, 1905), editor of psychological journals, and founder of the Society of Experimental Psychology, 3 August 1927.

Charles Doolittle Walcott, 76, assistant geologist for the U.S. Geological Survey under Clarence King and J. Wesley Powell (1879-1893) and chief geologist for the survey (1894-1907); secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (1907-1927); a founder of the National Research Council, the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (which he directed during World War I), and the national airmail service (1918); president of the National Academy of Sciences (1917-1923); author of the Air Commerce Act of 1926 and various works on geology; 9 February 1927.

John Findlay Wallace, 68, engineer, a pioneer in the construction of elevated railroad tracks, 3 July 1921.

Burt Green Wilder, 83, professor of neurology and invertebrate zoology at Cornell University (1867-1910), known for his studies of the animal and human brain and his collection of brains willed to him by prominent intellectuals such as psychologist Edward Titchener, economist Jeremiah Whipple Jenks, pathologist Theobald White, and pacifist Rosika Schwimmer; willed his own brain to the collection; 22 January 1925.