Thomas Corwin Mendenhall

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Thomas Corwin Mendenhall 1841–1922 - Photo detail, on the occasion of the award of the Franklin Medal in 1918

Thomas Corwin Mendenhall (born October 4, 1841 in Hanoverton , Ohio , † March 23, 1924 in Ravenna (Ohio) ) was an American physicist, meteorologist and self-taught Shakespeare researcher .

Life

Mendenhall was born in Hanoverton, Ohio to wagon maker and farmer Stephen Mendenhall and his wife Mary Thomas, the youngest of five siblings. The family belonged to the Quaker denomination . Mendenhall showed early on a strong inclination to mathematics and a desire to become a teacher. In 1858 he became assistant principal of the Marlboro Elementary School , Ohio, where the family had moved in 1852. He then repeatedly attended courses for teacher training, including in Alliance (Ohio) (partly with James A. Garfield ) and Case Western University (with Charles Augustus Young ) and acquired in 1861 at the "Southwest Normal School" in Lebanon ( Ohio) holds an “IN” ( Instructor Normalis ) degree, his only degree. He taught at various high schools and gained high recognition as a teacher and educator. Although he had received no conventional academic training, he was appointed professor of physics and mechanics at the Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical School (later Ohio State University ) in 1873 . He had previously married Susan Allan Marple in 1870. The marriage resulted in a child, the future physicist Charles Elwood Mendenhall (1872-1935).

In 1878, Thomas Mendenhall was chosen , probably on the recommendation of Morse , to promote the modernization of meteorology in the Japanese Meiji period , where he helped develop the Japanese government's meteorological service as o-yatoi gaikokujin at the Imperial University of Tokyo . During his three-year stay in Japan (1878-1880), he also held lectures on various scientific topics and climbed Mount Fuji , at the summit of which he carried out gravitational measurements in August 1880.

After his return to Ohio in 1881, he was instrumental in setting up the state weather service before he was appointed professor at the US Army Signal Corps in 1884 . In 1886 he gave up this position and took over the presidency of the Rose Polytechnic Institute in Terre Haute 1886-1889.

In 1889 he became superintendent of the US Coast and Geodetic Survey . In 1891 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1893 he wrote the so-called Mendenhall Order and oversaw the transition of the US systems of weight and measurement from the English to the metric system of units with the introduction of the meter and kilogram as standard units in the USA. In 1889 he served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). At that time he was responsible for the exact demarcation between the USA and Canada. From 1894 to 1901 he was President of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). Afterwards he and his wife retired overseas for 11 years with extensive trips to Europe, Egypt, Japan and the like. a. He returned to the United States in 1912, became President of the American Physical Society in 1923 and died in Ravenna, Ohio in 1924.

Scientific importance

His scientific achievements were more on the integrative-organizational side than the purely scientific side. He researched the reversion pendulum and developed a new ring pendulum for gravitation determination. He also worked in the field of seismology and atmospheric electricity. With his assistant “MC Adie” he carried out investigations into the lightning strike on the 1884 tallest building in the world, the Washington Monument . He is considered a pioneer of American-Japanese scientific cooperation.

Stylometry and Shakespeare Authorship Debate

In 1887 he published as one of the first quantitative scientific studies on the measurement of literary style criteria ( stylometry ), i. H. to a form of statistical style analysis that should help determine the authorship of historical texts. He was suggested to do this by the English mathematician Augustus de Morgan as early as 1851 . In particular, Mendenhall tried to work out the stylistic characteristics of different authors through statistical analyzes of the frequency distributions of different word lengths. On the basis of his investigations he came within the research on the Shakespeare'sche authorship debate to the conclusion that Francis Bacon could not be the presumed author of Shakespeare's works. While in 1975 C. B. Williams Mendenhall's results questioned because of statistical errors in the grouping of data, Peter Farey came to similar results as Mendenhall using computer methods, according to which Christopher Marlowe's works coincided stylistically with the beginning of Shakespeare's canon of works.

Honors

literature

  1. ↑ "About the use of plane surfaces and cutting edges in pendulums for gravity measurements." In: Messtechnik, Volume 14; Publisher F. Vieweg., 1894
  2. ^ Thomas Corwin Mendenhall : The Characteristic Curve of Composition . In: Science . 1887.
  3. ↑ Thomas Corwin Mendenhall : A mechanical solution of a literary problem . In: Popular Science Monthly . 1901.
  4. ^ Augustus De Morgan: A budget of Paradoxes . London 1872 (2nd edition: 1915).
  5. ^ C. B. Williams: Mendenhall's Studies of Word-Length Distribution in the Works of Shakespeare and Bacon . In: Biometrika . 1975.
  6. ^ Peter Farey: Marlowe Page. Archived from the original on September 30, 2014 .;
  7. ^ Peter Farey: Mendenhall's Graphs Revisited. In: Marlowe Page. Archived from the original on February 4, 2015 .;
  8. ^ The Franklin Institute Awards

Fonts

  • TC Mendenhall and OHTittmann, The Geographical Work of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, The Geographical Journal 1898

swell

  • CW Carey. (1999) "Mendenhall, Thomas Corwin", Oxford University Press, 15
  • Obituary in Science , 1924
  • TC Mendenhall, Report on Studies in Atmospheric Electricity Nat. Acad. Sciences Memoirs 1891
  • H. Crew: Thomas Corwin Mendenhall . In: Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences . tape 16 , 1934 (English, nasonline.org [PDF]).
  • R. Rubinger (Ed.). An American Scientist in Early Meiji Japan: The autobiographical Notes of Thomas C. Mendenhall., Univ. of Hawaii Press 1989
  • TC Mendenhall, (Jr.). (1989) American Scientist in Early Meiji Japan: The Autobiographical Notes of Thomas C. Mendenhall , ISBN 0-8248-1177-1
  • P. Grzybek, (Ed.). (2006): Contributions to the Science of Text and Language. Word Length Studies and Related Issues. Dordrecht, Springer 2006

See also

personal data
SURNAME Mendenhall, Thomas Corwin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist, meteorologist, and Shakespearean researcher
DATE OF BIRTH October 4, 1841
PLACE OF BIRTH Hanoverton , Ohio
DATE OF DEATH March 23, 1924
Place of death Ravenna , Ohio