Wooster Physicists

I recently discovered that the College’s yearbooks, The Index, are now online, and I spent several days extracting some physics history, supplemented by the Alumni Catalogue 1870-1925 and several Annual Catalogues, also online, as well as the Physics Department’s web site, which for many years I helped build and maintain. I cross checked the online information with an eBay paper copy of the Alumni Directory 2000 and attempted to resolve inconsistencies. The result is the Wooster Physics Faculty Timeline below. (Click or press for a much larger version.) I hope to continue improving it, and I welcome corrections, additions, and suggestions.

Beneath the timeline is an approximate plot of the effective number of physics faculty versus academic year, with half-filled squares counting as 1/2 (usually because of semester leaves, administrative work, or split positions) and empty squares as 0 (usually because of yearlong leaves).

History is hard, and I sometimes struggled to decide who to include as “physics faculty”. The timeline omits Lyman Knight and other instructors of science in the Wooster Preparatory School, which prepared students for the University of Wooster’s liberal arts college during 1872-1918. It also does not include lab assistants or adjuncts. For its first 70 years, starting with Samuel Kirkwood, one of the College’s mathematicians was part-time astronomy, presumably for the Wooster Observatory, but these faculty are also omitted.

Among the 79 included faculty, the timeline (but not the number plot) does feature some nineteenth century natural scientists, including Orange Stoddard (who was recruited from Miami of Ohio in 1870 when Wooster welcomed its first class). Other faculty include the American Physical Society’s first president Henry Rowland (who supervised the discovery of the Hall effect at JHU), Wooster graduate Karl Compton (who became president of MIT), Chia-Hua Chang, Stanley Shepherd, and Shila Garg.