Harry Fielding Reid

Harry Fielding Reid, Alaska 1933

Harry Fielding Reid (born May 18, 1859 in Baltimore , Maryland , † June 18, 1944 ibid) was an American geophysicist and professor at Johns Hopkins University . He was a pioneer of geophysics in the USA (especially glacier science and earthquake research ).

Life

Reid was the son of a sugar manufacturer, his mother came from the family of the first US President George Washington and Reid therefore always had good social connections in the USA. Reid was educated in Switzerland and at the Pennsylvania Military Academy and studied from 1877 at Johns Hopkins University with a bachelor's degree in 1880. His teachers included the physicist Henry Augustus Rowland and the mathematician James Joseph Sylvester . In 1885 he received his doctorate in physics from Rowland (with a dissertation on the platinum spectrum). From 1884 to 1886 he visited Europe and was with Hermann von Helmholtz in Berlin and JJ Thomson at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge , with whom he became friends. From 1886 he taught physics and mathematics at the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland (Ohio) , then briefly taught at the University of Chicago before becoming a professor at Johns Hopkins University in 1896. In 1911 he received the chair for dynamic geology and geography there, which reflected his pioneering role as a geophysicist in the USA.

In 1910 he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society . In 1912 he was accepted into the National Academy of Sciences . From 1924 to 1926 he was President of the American Geophysical Union . The Reid Glacier in Antarctica is named in his honor .

While still a student, he married Edith Gitting from a respected family in Baltimore and had a son and a daughter with her.

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Reid was a pioneer of glacier dynamics and visited Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska in 1890 , accompanied by students such as geologist Henry Platt Cushing (1860–1921), and again in 1892 to take measurements on glaciers to confirm his theory of glacier movement . One of the glaciers in the park was later named after him.

Another area of ​​Reid's work was seismology . From 1902 he collected seismological data for the US Geological Survey and in 1911 published one of the first summary reports in the USA on the then new science. With Andrew Cowper Lawson , professor at Berkeley and former graduate student (1888) of Johns Hopkins University, he was on the state commission for the study of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake . They concluded that the cause was the build-up of massive elastic stresses along the Fault of the St. Andreas Fissure, which erupted in the great earthquake of 1906 (theory of elastic rebound by Reid). He was then an internationally recognized expert on earthquakes, who also attended an international scientific conference in Japan in 1926.

Fonts

• Studies of Muir Glacier, National Geographic Magazine, 4, 1892, pp. 19-55
• Variations of Glaciers, 20 parts, 1896 to 1916 (first part in Science Volume 3, 1896, 867 and Journal of Geology, Volume 3, 1896, pp. 278-288)
• The variations of glaciers, 9 parts, Zeitschrift für Gletscherkunde, Volumes 1 to 9, 1906 to 1914
• The mechanics of glaciers, Journal of Geology, 4, 1896, pp. 912-928
• The California earthquake of April 18, 1906, Volume 2 of the Report of the (California) State Earthquake Investigation Commission: The mechanics of the Earthquake, Carnegie Institution, Washington DC, Publ. 87, Volume 2, 1910
• The elastic bound theory of earthquakes, Univ. Calif. Publ. Bulletin Dept. Geology, 6, 1911, pp. 413-444
• The Lisbon earthquake of November 1, 1755, Seis. Soc. Amer. Bull., 4, 1914, pp. 53-80
• The problems of seismology, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, 6, 1920, pp. 555-561

literature

• Andrew C. Lawson, Perry Byerly, Biographical Memoirs National Academy of Sciences, 1951, PDF (English, 935 kB)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Member History: Harry F. Reid. American Philosophical Society, accessed November 29, 2018 .