Thomas Corwin Mendenhall (October 4, 1841 – March 23, 1924) was an American autodidact physicist and meteorologist. He was the first professor hired at Ohio State University<!--Wikipedians do not use "The" as part of Ohio State's name; it is considered a marketing gimmick, and routinely deleted.--> in 1873 and the superintendent of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey (one of the ancestor organizations of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) from 1889 to 1894. Alongside his work, he was also an advocate for the adoption of the metric system by the United States and is the father of author profiling.

Biography

left|thumb|Mendenhall in 1890

Mendenhall was born in Hanoverton, Ohio, to Stephen Mendenhall, a farmer and carriage-maker, and Mary Thomas. In 1852 the family moved to Marlboro, a Quaker community outside of Akron, Ohio. His parents were strong abolitionists and frequently opened their home to escaped slaves heading north along the Underground Railroad. Mendenhall became principal of the local primary school in 1858. He formalized his teaching qualifications at National Normal University in 1861 with an Instructor Normalis degree.

While living in Columbus, Ohio, he married Susan Allan Marple in 1870. The couple had one child, Charles Elwood Mendenhall (1872–1935), teacher and chairman of the physics department at University of Wisconsin–Madison for 34 years.

He taught at a number of schools in Ohio including Central High School in Columbus, gaining an impressive reputation as a teacher and educator. In 1873, although he lacked conventional academic credentials, he was appointed professor of physics and mechanics at the Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College. The college ultimately became Ohio State University, He was later awarded the first ever honorary Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in 1878. he was recruited to help the modernization of Meiji Era Japan as one of the o-yatoi gaikokujin (hired foreigners), serving as visiting professor of physics at Tokyo Imperial University. In connection with this appointment, he founded a meteorological observatory to make systematic observations during his residence in Japan. From measurements using a Kater's pendulum of the force of gravity at sea level and at the summit of Mount Fuji, Mendenhall deduced a value for the mass of the Earth that agreed closely with estimates that Francis Baily had made in England by another method. He also made a series of elaborate measurements of the wavelengths of the solar spectrum by means of a large spectrometer. An early model of the original 1890s Mendenhall Gravimeter is on display at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

left|thumb|[[Hermann von Helmholtz and his wife (seated), Hugo Kronecker (left), Henry Villard(center) and Thomas Corwin Mendenhall (right)—taken at the studio of Mathew Brady in New York City, 1893]]

Mendenhall was appointed president of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute from 1894 until 1901, when he emigrated to Europe. It was painted by his former pupil Annie Ware Sabine Siebert, who was the first recipient of a Master of Arts degree from The Ohio State University in 1886, and one of the first women to earn an architecture degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1888.[https://library.osu.edu/buckeye-stroll/locations/siebert-hall] A portrait by famous artist and Columbus, Ohio native George Bellows was commissioned by the Ohio State University in 1913.

thumb|right|200px|Mendenhall's grave (third from left) at Forest Hill Cemetery

The largest collection of images, historical documents and handwritten material relating to Thomas Corwin Mendenhall is with Mendenhall family member documentary filmmaker Sybil Drew. Prompted by a suggestion made by the English mathematician Augustus De Morgan in 1851, Mendenhall attempted to characterize the style of different authors through the frequency distribution of words of various lengths. In this article Mendenhall mentioned the possible relevance of this technique to the Shakespeare authorship question, and several years later the idea was picked up by a supporter of the theory that Sir Francis Bacon was the true author of the works usually attributed to Shakespeare. He paid for a team of two people to undertake the counting required, but the results did not appear to support the theory. For comparison, in 1901 Mendenhall also had works by Christopher Marlowe analysed, and proponents of the Marlovian theory of Shakespeare authorship welcomed his finding that "in the characteristic curve of his plays Christopher Marlowe agrees with Shakespeare about as well as Shakespeare agrees with himself."

Honors

thumb|Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau, Alaska

  • Honorary Ph.D. from The Ohio State University (1878)
  • The Mendenhall Valley and Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau, Alaska were named for him (1892)
  • Elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society (1895)
  • Elected member of the American Philosophical Society (1899)
  • Cullum Geographical Medal of the American Geographical Society (1901)
  • Order of the Sacred Treasure, Japan (1911)

Bibliography

  • Mendenhall, Thomas Corwin and Drew, Sybil (2017) "An American Scientist In Japan 1878-1881 And Japan Revisited After Thirty Years"
  • Mendenhall, Thomas Corwin and Drew, Sybil (2017) "The Alaska Boundary Line And Twenty Unsettled Miles: The History Of St. Croix River"

Notes

References

;Obituary

  • Science, July 11, 1924

Further reading

  • Rubinger, Richard (1989) American Scientist in Early Meiji Japan: The Autobiographical Notes of Thomas C. Mendenhall,
  • Carey, C. W. (1999) "Mendenhall, Thomas Corwin", American National Biography, Oxford University Press, 15: 297-298,
  • [Anon.] (2001) "Mendenhall, Thomas Corwin", Encyclopædia Britannica, Deluxe CDROM edition
  • Hebra, A. & Hebra, A. J. (2003) Measure for Measure: The Story of Imperial, Metric, and Other Units
  • Drew, Sybil (2016) Self Styled Genius: The Life of Thomas Corwin Mendenhall
  • Sybil Drew https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3091159/