USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Fifty years of Boston; a memorial volume issued in commemoration of the tercentenary of 1930; 1880-1930, Pt. 2 > Part 1
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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47
Gc 974.402 B65bod pt.2 1780896
M. L.
REYNOLDS HISTORICAL GENEALOGY COLLECTION
ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 01105 9786
Gq
FIFTY YEARS of BOSTON
1550-1930
A MEMORIAL VOLUME Pt.2
ISSUED IN COMMEMORATION OF THE TERCENTENARY OF 1930
$0
TRIMOUNTAINE
·1650
TERO
COMPILED BY THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON MEMORIAL HISTORY OF THE
BOSTON TERCENTENARY COMMITTEE
ELISABETH M. HERLIHY Chairman and Editor
CHARLES K. BOLTON
JOSEPH E. CHAMBERLIN
M. A. DEWOLFE HOWE CHARLES F. READ
ELEANOR TUDOR
WILLIAM A. LEAHY, Editorial Adviser
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Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019
https://archive.org/details/fiftyyearsofbost02unse
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FIFTY YEARS OF BOSTON
was known at this time of the factors which determined the acoustical properties of large audience halls, with the result that many auditoriums were found to be nearly failures, after large sums had been spent on their erection. To the solution of these problems Wallace C. Sabine devoted himself, and soon became one of the leading authorities on the subject. As a result of his fundamental investigation, proper acoustical properties can now be assured in advance in the construction of any new building,- a fact which even now the general public does not seem to appreciate. In the advance of the modern physics of the past thirty years, valuable contributions have been made by William Duane and Theodore Lyman to the study of X-rays and other radiations of subtle and mysterious potency. Further impetus in this field of investigation at Harvard was given by the establishment of the Crufts laboratory for the study of radia- tions of long-wave lengths, those radiations which are the vehicle for radio communication. Here, under the direction of Professors G. W. Pierce, E. L. Chaffee and R. F. Field, such noteworthy work has been done as to attract many students from other American institutions and from foreign countries. In quite another field, that of the effect of enormous pressure on various materials, Professor P. W. Bridgman has become without doubt the world's foremost authority.
The staff of the Department of Chemistry at Harvard has included during the past fifty years, and still includes, many of the foremost chemists of their respective times. The hundreds of papers which have been published from this department form an important part of American chemical research. The great distinction of Theodore William Richards, however, has tended, perhaps unduly, to overshadow the high reputations of the other members of the depart- ment; yet it may be noted that of the twenty-seven chemists who had the honor of being members of the National Academy of Sciences in 1929, five are members of the Harvard faculty and four others have formerly been associated with the Harvard Laboratory .* The world-wide reputation of this laboratory, nevertheless, is due to the work of Professor Richards more than that of any other one man. His accurate determinations of the atomic weights (one of the most fundamental physical constants) of many of the elements, won him the distinction of being the only American so far to be awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry. In addition to receiving this highest recognition which can be bestowed upon a chemist, he was an honorary member of all the most important chemical societies throughout the world. The success of his determinations was due not only to great manipulative skill, but also more especially to a thorough comprehension of possible sources of error, which he eliminated by clever methods, brilliantly conceived. In addition to his work on atomic weights, he was one of the foremost physical chemists of America. The im- portance of his conceptions of the fundamental nature of matter, based upon direct experimental results rather than upon more speculative reasoning and first published some thirty years ago, is at present gaining increased recognition.
* EDITORIAL NOTE .- Further evidence of its importance may be found in the recent announcement that both the Chandler and the William H. Nichols medals for achievement in chemical science for 1931 have been awarded to Professor James B. Conant, who happens to be a native of Boston. It is scarcely necessary to add that the scientific departments at Harvard contain several scholars who have received similar distinctions. Profes- sors W. M. Davis, R. A. Daly, A. E. Kennelly and Theodore Lyman may be mentioned among the older men.
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REPRESENTATIVE BOSTONIANS -SCIENTISTS
SAMUEL P. LANGLEY FRANCIS A. WALKER
WILLIAM JAMES
PERCIVAL LOWELL HENRY M. HOWE
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Professor Richards was the pupil of Josiah P. Cooke, who was head of the Department of Chemistry at Harvard from 1850 to 1894, and who was recog- nized both in this country and in Europe as one of the foremost chemists of his time. Cooke had great influence in the establishment of instruction in chemistry in America on a firm experimental basis, at a time when students were taught mostly by rote from the driest of text books. The sympathetic support of President Eliot, who also began his career as a teacher of chemistry, made possible the rapid growth of Harvard as a center of research. Just as Richards carried on the accurate work of Cooke, so Professor Gregory P. Baxter, a pupil of Richards, has continued to maintain the reputation of this laboratory as the foremost in the world for the determination of atomic weights.
In the natural sciences the third quarter of the nineteenth century was one of pre-eminence at Harvard, for it was then that Louis Agassiz was giving lec- tures on geology and zoology, and that Asa Gray, hardly less renowned, was compiling his classic works on American flora. But by 1880 Agassiz had died and Gray had retired from active service. Thus the way was open for the introduction of new kinds of research both in zoology and in botany, which dealt with the development and life of animals and plants rather than with . their systematic classification. So when William G. Farlow, who was probably the first professor in America to hold an independent chair in cryptogamic botany, George L. Goodale, who was devoting himself to plant physiology, and E. L. Mark, fresh from his work on embryology in the laboratory of zoology in Leipzig, offered instruction and opportunities for research in their respective subjects, Harvard became one of the few places in America where the new biology was taught. Much valuable work has come from these laboratories modestly started some fifty years ago; but probably the most valuable products, particularly during the first thirty years, were the men who were trained in them and went forth to hold many of the most important positions in the universities of this country, there to multiply many times the progress of the parent laboratories by the aid of the training which they had received as students.
During the last decade the trend of zoology has been toward the study of living animals rather than the study of the complexities of animal structure through work on preserved specimens. The department at Harvard has had its share in directing this new movement, which has turned more and more in the direction of physiology and of observation of animal behavior. In fact Harvard bids fair to become the center of biological research in America by the opening, in September, 1931, of the "Biological Institute." Gifts and grants of several million dollars for research in this field have been made; a very large building, in which are centralized most of the biological laboratories of the University, has been erected and equipped; and already fundamental problems of life are being studied under more favorable experimental conditions than ever before.
The Museum of Comparative Zoology was under the curatorship of Alexander Agassiz, son of Louis Agassiz, from 1874 to 1897. During this time Mr. Agassiz, who was greatly interested in marine zoology, conducted numerous collecting explorations, some in conjunction with the United States Govern-
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ment and some at his own expense, in the West Indies and in the Pacific. His book on "The Islands and Coral Reefs of the Fiji" (1899) is a basic author- itative work in this field. As curator of the museum he caused the amassing of collections of great value in the study of many phases of natural science and he was chiefly responsible for the success of the "Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology," in which have appeared many important papers from the departments of natural history and of geology.
Two noteworthy institutions conducted under the auspices of Harvard and closely allied to the Departments of Botany and of Zoology are the Bussey Institute and the Arnold Arboretum. The former, for many years a not very successful school of agriculture, was reorganized in 1908 as a Graduate School of Applied Biology. Here has been assembled a staff of remarkably brilliant investigators, four out of the five being members of the National Academy of Sciences. One of the chief fields of research has been on the laws of heredity, William E. Castle working upon animal genetics and Edward M. East on plant genetics. An important adjunct of the institute is the Harvard Forest at Petersham, Massachusetts, which is the oldest demonstration tract and research laboratory of forestry in the United States.
Authorities differ as to whether Boston possesses in the Arnold Arboretum the most remarkable collection of trees in the world or only the most remarkable collection in America. Be that as it may, there have been assembled in the past fifty years, on land furnished by the Bussey Institute and by the City of Boston, some six thousand or more species and varieties of trees and shrubs. To Charles Sprague Sargent is due the chief credit for the establishment of an arboretum renowned throughout the world. Of especial value are the speci- mens from Japan, Korea and China, many of which were brought to this country for the first time by Ernest Henry Wilson, an explorer of the highest ability, who succeeded Sargent as keeper of the Arboretum, and whose death by an automobile accident on October 15, 1930, was a great loss to science.
If space in this chapter is given to a statement of progress in our knowl- edge of the science of trees, anthropology, the science of man, surely should not be omitted. This science has two very different aspects, the physical one, dealing with man's differentiation into races and with the complex prob- lems of heredity, and the cultural one, closely related to the historical and humanistic sciences. The basis for study in either case must be drawn chiefly from collections of very ancient and often prehistoric date. The Peabody Museum at Harvard contains one of the most valuable of these collections in America, the accumulation of which is a distinct scientific achievement. The significance of this work cannot be better stated than to quote directly from a recent report by Professor Roland B. Dixon, the curator of ethnology in the Peabody Museum.
"Archeology has, in the last half-century, unearthed immense collections of man's handiwork in stone, pottery, bronze and iron from almost every corner of the world, enabling us to trace his achieve- ments with a certainty and in a detail undreamed of at the time the Museum was founded. It has revealed that the New World has
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played a part of surpassing interest in the history of man's develop- ment, and here Harvard has come to the fore. The pioneer work in the Maya region of Central America was undertaken by expeditions sent out from this Museum, and indeed every member, past and present, of the Museum staff and the division has made some outstanding con- tribution along archæological, ethnological, somatological or linguistic lines."
In the extension of the scientific spirit to new fields of investigation, the field of the mind, or psychology, has not been neglected. True it is that the new laboratory at Harvard University was an extension of the Department of Philosophy, but the spirit which animated its research endeavors was essen- tially the scientific spirit. William James in his essay, "Does Consciousness Exist?" expressed the doubts and formulations out of which the objective attitude toward mind commonly called "Behaviorism" later took shape. Professor Hugo Muensterberg turned the methods and results of experimental psychology into the channels of applied psychology, attacking, in turn, the problems of forensic psychology, the psychology of advertising, industrial psychology and vocational tests. Notable work in animal experimentation was done by Robert M. Yerkes. Walter F. Dearborn by an experimental approach to the problem has reached a more precise definition of intelligence and has established definite correlations with physiological age.
In order to produce any extensive amount of research at a university, the staff must not be too heavily burdened with class instruction, and a fairly large number of graduate students must be in attendance to carry out the details of laboratory experimentation under the direction of the professors. In both of these respects conditions were favorable at Harvard long before they were at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The first graduate depart- ment at Technology, indeed, was that organized by Professor Arthur A. Noyes * in about 1900 in physical chemistry. This was at a period when the attention of chemists was centered on this new field of the study of fundamental chemical principles, especially in relation to electrolytes, and Professor Noyes gathered about him a group of brilliant young men, such as has seldom, if ever, been equaled in this country. Among them may be mentioned particularly Dr. Gilbert N. Lewis, a graduate of Harvard, whose early work on the structure of the atom has made his name internationally familiar to all students of. chemistry and of physics, and Dr. Richard C. Tolman, a graduate of the Institute of Technology, who has since devoted himself to the new mathematical physics, and has become one of the leading authorities of the world on "Relativity" and those conceptions with which the name of Einstein is associated.
The publications from this laboratory placed it among the foremost labora- tories in the country, and gave to it a wide reputation abroad. In organic chemistry graduate instruction with its accompanying scientific productivity
* EDITORIAL NOTE .- Professor Noyes, who already held the Willard Gibbs medal and the Davy medal of the Royal Society of London, has recently been selected as the first recipient of the newly established Richards medal, named in honor of Theodore W. Richards.
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did not gain significant proportion till after the late war; but since that time the number of students has grown enormously. Of ninety Doctors' degrees granted between 1921 and 1930 by the Institute of Technology, seventy have been in chemistry, and by far the greatest number of these have been in organic chemistry.
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While the Institute has thus been taking a leading place among the graduate schools of the country in pure chemistry, it has had perhaps even greater influence upon the development of chemical engineering. A depart- ment in this subject was established in 1888 and was developed under the leadership of Professor William H. Walker, who may well be considered the father of chemical engineering education. The Research Laboratory of Applied Chemistry of this department, also organized by Professor Walker, has gained an enviable reputation in training young men for industrial research. Indeed, its success has been to some extent its own undoing, since repeatedly members of the staff who have made marked progress in the solution of industrial prob- lems have been enticed away into the industrial world by salaries far beyond what an educational institution can pay.
In 1919 an arrangement was made by which the magnificent resources of the Institute of Technology, consisting of a staff with specialized knowledge and of a splendid equipment in laboratories and apparatus, became available, under certain restriction, for studying problems submitted by affiliated industrial corporations. These arrangements, under the management of the Division of Industrial Co-operation and Research, are in the direction of a closer relation- ship between the technical schools and the industries, like the affiliations which have proved so successful in the development of the industries in Germany. At the Institute, so far, the departments chiefly concerned have been those of chemistry and of physics.
The Department of Physics up to this time, 1930, has been chiefly devoted to undergraduate instruction, but with the advent of President Compton, himself an eminent physicist, it is expected that a strong graduate department will be organized which, in conjunction with the department of physics at Harvard, will, it is hoped, make Cambridge the leading center in America in modern physical research.
An appreciation of the significance of the discoveries which are made in these highly specialized laboratories is beyond the comprehension of the aver- age man. Indeed, the average man gives very little thought to the vast amount of research in pure science which has made possible the ordinary conveniences of everyday life. This is nowhere more true than in relation to what is supplied to him almost automatically by public service. How little does one question the certainty of the supply of pure water or how seldom does one speculate on how sewage is made innocuous after it has left his premises! Yet the answers to both of these queries depend upon investigations carried on within the past fifty years and largely initiated by the work done by William T. Sedgwick and his colleagues. In 1886 the Massachusetts State Board of Health, of which Dr. Henry P. Walcott was chairman, established an experiment station at Lawrence to study the filtration of water and the disposal of sewage. This station, which was the first of its kind in America, was under the direction
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of Hiram F. Mills, an engineer, Thomas M. Drown, a chemist, and William T. Sedgwick, a biologist, the two latter being connected with the Massachu- setts Institute of Technology. Shortly after the establishment of the Lawrence station, a biological laboratory was started at the Chestnut Hill Reservoir by the Boston Water Works, and at about the same time the Board of Health inaugurated a sanitary survey of the inland waters of the state. The investi- gations in all of these projects were elosely co-ordinated and here for the first time the sciences of engineering, chemistry and biology were combined and brought to bear on problems of water purification and sewage treatment. The results of these studies were published by the State Board of Health in 1890 and are regarded by the sanatory profession as American classics.
Professor Sedgwick, having thus had his interest aroused to problems of publie health and sanitation, continued to do pioneer work in many other directions in this field. Although, to be sure, Pasteur had laid the foundations of bacteriology by liis epoch-making discoveries in the 60's, the medical pro- fession had been slow to apply them directly in their practice and even as late as 1885 very little had been done toward solving the problems of public health by the aid of a knowledge of bacteriology. Here, then, was a splendid oppor- tunity to make great progress by a method which had been neglected, and there issued from Professor Sedgwick's laboratory during the next thirty years many publications of fundamental importanee. These dealt not only with methods of purification of water and the disposal of sewage, but also with the control of the quality of milk as to bacterial content; with methods of preserva- tion of food; with studies of epidemics, such as that of typhoid fever; and with studies on industrial hygiene and other similar subjects. Important as were these investigations and the procedures which resulted from them, their value to the public could not be made full use of until the public had become educated in these matters. The development of health education received a great impetus, particularly in the early years, from the efforts of Sedgwick and his students.
The Massachusetts State Department of Public Health has continued to hold the position which it thus took some fifty years ago as one of the most progressive state departments of public health. Under the direction of the eminent Dr. Theobald Smith of the Harvard Medical School there was estab- lished a laboratory for the preparation of vaccines and antitoxins at Forest Hills. This was the first state laboratory of its kind and it has served as a model for similar laboratories elsewhere, as have also the State Laboratories of Bacteriology, of Food and Drug Analysis, and of Water Analysis (con- ducted until 1897 by Mrs. Ellen H. Richards at the Institute of Technology), all now located in the State House. The work conducted by Dr. Alice Hamilton on industrial hygiene is another phase of public health which has redounded to the credit of Boston.
Although Boston has been outstanding as a center of research in pure science, it has been less conspicuous for advances in industrial invention. As pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, such inventions in these days are chiefly the outgrowth of the research laboratories of the great industrial corporations, none of which are now situated here. The first research labora- tory of the American Bell Telephone Company, however, was located in Boston.
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That it should have been came about naturally, since the birthplace of the telephone was at 109 Court street. It is difficult to realize that the first tele- phone exchange ever in existence (which connected five subscribers) had been set up in this city only three years before the beginning of the period covered in this chapter. Seldom, if ever, has an invention had such marvelously rapid growth in extent and in improvement as the telephone has had. The laboratory in Boston remained the center of this tremendous development until the con- solidation of the experimental departments of the American Company here with that of the Western Electric Company and the establishment of a joint laboratory in New York in 1907. During these first thirty years telephony was growing from infancy to youthful strength and there was foreshadowed the all-important part which it plays in the life of today. Some of the out- standing developments during this time were: The microphone transmitter, the automatic hook switch, the polarized substation bell, the multiple switch- board, hard-drawn copper wire, the bridging bell, the solid-back granular- carbon transmitter, paper insulated cable, the common battery switchboard, the loading coil and the phantom circuit. Many men have become famous in the telephone world through these and other inventions, of whom Francis Blake, for his work on the transmitter, Dr. Frank B. Jewett, now president of the Bell Telephone Laboratorics, for his work on long-distance telephony, and John J. Carty, a native of Cambridge, for his part in the development of the wireless telephone, may be particularly mentioned.
Of the thirty-three laboratories listed by the National Research Council in 1927 as conducting industrial research in Boston, almost all are primarily testing or control laboratories, in which more or less investigation of special problems arising in the respective plants is conducted. In addition to these, there are several excellent laboratories in Boston, maintained by consulting chemists, the most widely known of which, perhaps, is that of Arthur D. Little, Inc. This was one of the first commercial laboratories in the country to engage in the study of basic problems in the industries. Doctor Little early estab- lished a reputation for himself in the paper industry by putting the sulphite process, now so generally in use for the production of wood fiber for paper making, on a sound manufacturing basis. In 1886 he opened a consulting laboratory and in 1900 formed a partnership with Dr. William H. Walker, who has been mentioned before in connection with the development of chemical engincering at the Institute of Technology and who added greatly to his repu- tation as one of the foremost chemical engineers of the country by developing during the war the great plants of the Chemical Warfare Service at Edgewood Arsenal. The laboratory was incorporated in 1909 under its present name and has made studies of industrial problems in widely diversified industries. Recently very extensive and successful researches have been in progress upon the production of alcohols, esters and other compounds from the waste gases of oil refineries and upon the vapor-phase cracking of petroleum for gasolene. Doctor Little concludes an enumeration of the activities of the laboratory with the following paragraph :
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