William Barton Rogers

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William Barton Rogers

William Barton Rogers (born December 7, 1804 in Philadelphia , † May 30, 1882 in Boston ) was an American physicist and geologist. He was the founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1861 .

His father, Patrick Kerr Rogers, immigrated from Ireland, was a doctor and professor of mathematics and physics at the College of William and Mary , where Rogers also studied (without a degree). In 1828 he succeeded his father as professor of physics and chemistry. He also began to be interested in geology and in 1835 began organizing the Virginia Geological Survey, which he initiated. With his brother Henry Darwin Rogers , then state geologist in Pennsylvania, he investigated the geology of the Appalachian Mountains and published on metamorphic transformation of coal and mountain formation. The Geological Survey was discontinued in 1842. But Rogers was since 1835 professor of physics at the University of Virginia , where he also taught mineralogy, chemistry and geology. In order to be closer to the then scientific center of the USA in Boston, he gave up his professorship in 1853 and moved to Boston, where his wife Emma Savage came from, whom he had married in 1849. In Boston, he was pursuing plans for a technical college that would also run pure research. This led to the founding of MIT in 1861, of which he became the first president. On the side he was since 1861 inspector for gas and gasometers in Massachusetts. In 1870 he gave up his presidency for health reasons. From 1878 to 1881 he was again President and then Professor Emeritus for Physics and Geology.

He was a founding member of the National Academy of Sciences and was its president from 1878 until his death, and he was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science . In 1845 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1866 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Harvard University .

The Mount Rogers in Virginia it is named in honor.

Fonts

  • Strength of Materials , Charlottesville 1838
  • Elements of Mechanical Philosophy , Boston 1852
  • Papers on the Geology of Virginia , New York 1884 (Jed Hotchkiss' reissue of the Geological Survey of Virginia reports, published in Richmond in six volumes, 1836-1840)

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