King, Clarence Rivers

(b. Newport, Rhode Island, 6 January 1842; d. Phoenix, Arizona, 24 December 1901)

geology.

Clarence King’s ancestors included Rhode Islanders distinguished in politics, business, and the arts. He was the son of Caroline Florence Little and James Rivers King, a Canton trader. Mrs. King raised her son to be a Congregationalist and helped him with classical languages as a youth. His father died in 1848, but the family business prospered until the Panic of 1857. In 1859 Mrs. King married a merchant who paid for her son’s college education. Clarence King took the intensive chemistry course, which included James Dwight Dana’s geology lectures, at Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School from September 1860 to July 1862, when he graduated with a bachelor of philosophy degree. Between graduation and April 1863, King read further in geology and audited Louis Agassiz’s lectures on glaciers.

King joined the California Geological Survey as an assistant from the fall of 1863 to the fall of 1866. He briefly studied the geology of Arizona as a scienctific escort to a military road survey in the winter of 1865. From 1867 to 1878 he directed the U.S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, a study of topography, petrology, and geological history along the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroad lines. The twenty-five-year-old King had obtained this responsibility over the heads of four major generals. During May 1879 to March 1881 he was the first director of the U.S. Geological Survey, winning the appointment with the support of John Wesley Powell, who became his successor in 1881. King also led the mining investigations for the tenth census from May 1879 to May 1882. After resigning he worked as a mining geologist. Despite rheumatism, malaria, and a spinal affliction, King was robust enough for strenuous fieldwork until 1893, when financial and personal worries culminated in a nervous breakdown.

King and Ada Todd, a Negro, were married in New York in September 1888 by a Negro Methodist minister, but fear of scandal kept them from filing the certificate that would have legalized the ceremony. They had five children. Apart from his secret life with his family, King lived in genteel, affluent, literary society when in San Francisco or the East. An intimate friend of John Hay and Henry Adams, King influenced the latter with his enthusiastic adoption of Lord Kelvin’s concept of a short age for the earth. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (1876) and was a founding member of the Geological Society of America, in addition to joining the American Philosophical Society and other scientific groups.

King’s scientific work may be arbitrarily divided into practical, descriptive, and theoretical units. In 1870 he outlined the Green River coal deposits and correctly predicted greater silver strikes in the Comstock lode, and in 1872 he exposed a diamond fraud. His descriptive work included mapping parts of the Sierra Nevada while on the California survey. In 1863 and 1864 he found fossils that dated the Mariposa gold-bearing slates as Jurassic, and in 1870 he discovered glaciers on Mount Shasta. King hired the microscopic petrographer Ferdinand Zirkle for the fortieth-parallel survey to prepare the first extensive monograph (1876) on American rocks studied in thin section. He also instructed his topographers to use the new triangulation methods developed on the California survey and to record their data on contour maps. In 1880 King established Carl Barus’ laboratory as part of the U.S. Geological Survey to measure physical constants of rocks, and in 1893 he used Barus’ data for diabase to calculate the age of the earth’s crust. King’s calculation of twenty-four million years, based on Kelvin’s theory of the cooling of the earth, was a much shorter time than the uniformitarians had assumed. This figure was widely accepted until the concept of radioactive energy upset the basis of King and Kelvin’s work.

In 1877 King, faced with having to explain the geological past of the American West, promulgated a new catastrophist theory that employed more rapid rates of geological change than those operating on the present landscape. In 1878 he extended his theory to account for the source of volcanic lava: when very rapid erosion took place, decreased pressure allowed subcrustal local melting. He refined Ferdinand von Richthofen’s law of the succession of volcanic rocks by adding acid, neutral, and basic phases resulting from gravity separation in the magma chamber. His neocatastrophism led him to propose a modification of Darwin’s theory of biological evolution: natural selection explained biological change in geologically quiet times, but in revolutions only flexible organisms adapted and survived the rapid change in environment, while the others died out. Given King’s prestige, his ideas eventually helped theories such as diastrophism and neo-Lamarckianism to gain a hearing.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Thurman Wilkins’ scholarly, well-written Clarence King, A Biography (New York, 1958), includes a bibliography of King’s popular and scientific publications, a list of MS collections which have material on King, and citations to printed secondary works.

Treatments of scientific institutions with which King was associated have appeared since Wilkins’s book. See, for example, Gerald Nash, “The Conflict Between Pure and Applied Science in Nineteenth Century Public Policy: The California Geological Survey, 1860-1874,” in Isis,54 (1963), 217-228; Thomas Manning, Government in Science: The U.S. Geological Survey, 1867-1894 (Lexington, Ky., 1967); Gerald White, Scientists in Conflict: The Beginnings of the Oil Industry in California (San Marino, Calif., 1968), ch. 2, on the California survey; and the section on the fortieth-parallel survey in Richard Bartlett, Great Surveys of the American West (Norman, Okla., 1962).

William Goetzmann reviews King’s entire scientific career in Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (New York, 1968), chs. 10, 12, 16; Loren Eiseley, in Darwin’s Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It (Garden City, N.Y., 1958), ch. 9, discusses the importance of the problem of the age of the earth; and Edward Pfeifer, in “The Genesis of American Neolamarckianism,” in Isis,56 (1965), 156-167, comments on King’s relevance for other American scientists.

Michele L. Aldrich