Franklin Hiram King

Franklin Hiram King (8 June, 1848 – 4 August, 1911) was an American agricultural scientist who was born on a farm near Whitewater, WI, attended country schools, and received his professional training first at Whitewater State Normal School and at Cornell University.

King served as a professor of agricultural physics at the University of Wisconsin from 1888 until 1902. Interested in a wide range of subjects throughout his career, King made major contributions during these years in research and teaching that dealt with applications of physics to agriculture. Most attention was given to soil physics, e.g., water-holding capacities of soils, moisture requirements of plants, aeration, movement of water in soils, movement of groundwater, the drafts of plows, and the lifting power of windmills; he also began studies of soil fertility.

King left Wisconsin to become chief of the Division of Soil Management in the USDA Bureau of Soils in Washington, DC in January 1902. His findings in the next 2 years, that the concentration of nutrients in soil solution was correlated with crop yields, began to undermine beliefs held strongly by chief of the bureau about the relations of soil chemistry to plant growth and soil fertility. King was forced to resign but privately published several additional papers from his research during this period.

King returned to Madison, where he devoted the last 7 years of his life to summarizing earlier findings and conducting further research in agricultural physics, including the ventilation of farm buildings. Three of his seven books were written during that period, the best known of which is 'Farmers of Forty Centuries, or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan', which recounted his investigations into what would now be called sustainable agriculture during a 9-month tour of Asia in 1909. The last chapter was completed after his death by his wife, Carrie Baker King, and the book was published in 1911.

He is most popularly known for designing the cylindrical storage silo for holding grain, which reduces the occurence of moldy corners. Some have speculated that the designer of the Guggenheim, Frank Lloyd Wright, was influenced by King's designs. King is commemorated at the University of Wisconsin-Madison by the renamed King Hall, which is the same Agricultural Physics Hall in which he worked during his tenure there and which now houses the Department of Soil Science, and by the F.H. King Students of Sustainable Agriculture club, a student organization.

External links

• Works by Franklin Hiram King at Project Gutenberg
• 'Franklin Hiram King – Pioneer Scientist' (http://www.soils.wisc.edu/soils/people/poets/fh_king.htm)