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HENRY AUGUSTUS ROWLAND. 18481901. 



By the death of Professor Rowland on April 16,1901, America lost her 

 leading physicist, and the Royal Society one of her most distinguished 

 foreign Fellows. 



Henry Augustus Rowland was born at Honesdale, Pennsylvania, on 

 November 27, 1848. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, 

 were all clergymen and graduates of Yale College. He had the mis- 

 fortune at the age of eleven years to lose his father, who is described 

 as interested in chemistry and natural philosophy. He appears to 

 have been also destined for the ministry, but before going to school for 

 that purpose, he had quite given himself up to chemical experiments, 

 glass-blowing, and the making of apparatus, and was in the habit of 

 delivering experimental lectures to the members of his family. 



In 1865, at the age of 16, he was sent to the Phillips Academy at 

 Andover to study Latin and Greek, as a preliminary for entering 

 Yale. This proved extremely distasteful to the young experimentalist, 

 and at his own suggestion he was sent in the autumn of the same year 

 to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute at Troy, where he remained 

 five years, and graduated as a Civil Engineer in 1870. At this institute 

 he spent most of his time in designing and constructing physical 

 apparatus with which he made his own experiments. His subsequent 

 achievements are striking testimony, if such were needed, to the value 

 of such practical constructive training in physical education. 



Before his twentieth birthday he had decided to devote his life to 

 scientific research ; and, realising that his opportunity for the pursuit 

 of science lay in becoming a teacher, after a year in the field as a civil 

 engineer he took a post as instructor in science in a western college 

 from which in the spring of 1872 he returned to the Institute at Troy 

 as instructor in physics. Here he spent three years of hard work in 

 study and research, in addition to his teaching work, and carried out 

 his first important scientific investigations. 



His first great paper on magnetic permeability was completed in 

 June, 1873, but was more than once rejected by publishing agencies in 

 America, because it was not understood. In this paper, besides other 

 important points, he clearly stated and formulated for the first time the 

 law of the magnetic circuit, which has since played so large a part in 

 the design of electrical machinery. Failing to get it published in his 

 own country, he at last ventured to send it to Clerk Maxwell, who 

 promptly recognized its merit, and secured its immediate appearance 

 in the Philosophical Magazine for August 1873. This work at once 

 gained him European recognition as an investigator of high order, and 



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