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 estimate that the resulting physics faculty timeline (below) is at least 90% accurate. I hope to continue improving it, and I welcome corrections, additions, and suggestions.
History is hard, and I sometimes struggled to decide who to include as “physics faculty”. Currently, 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. It also does not include lab assistants or adjuncts or a World War II instructor of flight. For its first 70 years, one of the College’s mathematicians, including Benjamin Yanney, was part-time astronomy, presumably for the Observatory, but these faculty are also omitted.
Among the 75 or so included faculty, the timeline does features some nineteenth century natural scientists, including Orange Nash Stoddard (who was recruited to Wooster in 1870 when the College welcomed its first class). Other faculty include Henry Rowland (a founder of the American Physical Society, who later supervised his PhD student Edwin Hall‘s discovery of the Hall effect), Karl Compton (brother of Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Arthur Compton ’13), Chua-Hua Chang, Stanley Shepherd, and Shila Garg.
The timeline also includes at bottom 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).
Wooster physics faculty timeline. Click for a larger version; click again (or pinch to zoom) for an even larger version. Last updated 2025 August 23.