SKETCH OF HENRY AUGUSTUS ROWLAND. in 



merits and studies. The subjects taught, however, were so con- 

 genial to him that one reading of the lessons assigned him was 

 sufficient to insure a creditable recitation. 



Owing to an injury to his knee during a snowball fight, he 

 gave up his classes in Troy and studied chemistry for half a year 

 at the Sheffield Scientific School. Here he invented and made 

 the first continuous current dynamo ever constructed, which has 

 since been exhibited at the World's Fair at Chicago. Young 

 as he was, he was busily engaged in researches and experiments 

 on magnetism. He was an earnest student of Faraday's Re- 

 searches, Tyndairs Heat, Youmans's Conservation of Energy, and 

 books of similar nature, although he had never studied the sub- 

 ject of physics under a competent teacher. 



He returned to Troy and was graduated in 1870 with the degree 

 of C. E. On his return home he continued to work on his favor- 

 ite subjects of electricity and magnetism. About this time he 

 published his first paper, a letter to the Scientific American de- 

 scribing a visit to an inventor, who professed to obtain great 

 power from a single cell of a battery. Mr. Rowland, being fa- 

 miliar with the laws of the conservation of energy, knew there 

 must be some swindling device somewhere, and finally exposed it, 

 although a number of capitalists had already been defrauded of 

 large sums of money by this man's claims. For part of a year 

 Mr. Rowland was connected with a railroad in western New York 

 as civil engineer, but routine work of this nature was so distaste- 

 ful to him that he accepted the place of Instructor in Natural 

 Science in Wooster University in Ohio. After a few months' ex- 

 perience here, he went to Troy, N. Y., to teach physics. During 

 this period he had been engaged in researches on magnetic dis- 

 tribution, and what is now called magnetic permeability, using 

 a system of absolute magnetic units of his own invention and 

 calculating many cases of magnetic distribution by the method 

 of the magnetic circuit, now always used for the calculation of 

 dynamos and motors, and often ascribed to Hopkinson, but really 

 due to Rowland. These researches he rewrote three separate 

 times, and sent for three consecutive years to the leading scien- 

 tific journal of America. Each time the editor, who was not a 

 physicist, said that he had consulted the most eminent physicists 

 of the country, and their advice to Mr. Rowland was that he had 

 better study the subject before attempting to write any more 

 papers. This criticism naturally discouraged and depressed the 

 ambitious and studious man. Since his earliest youth he had 

 studied electricity and magnetism in spite of all opposition, trav- 

 eling from place to place with his trunks full of galvanic batteries 

 and electrical material, never receiving one word of encourage- 

 ment, but always looked at askance as one no better than he 



