Henry Rowland
Henry Augustus Rowland achieved high recognition
as expert on electricity. He was born in Honedsdale, Pennsylvania
in 1848 as the son of a Protestant clergyman, who had
descended from a long line of theologians. Rowland
entered the ministry school of Yale University but
rebelled against family expectations to pursue religious
studies. Excited by doing experiments in chemistry and
electricity, he left Yale to attend the Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute. He earned a degree in civil
engineering in 1870 and worked as a railroad surveyor
and as a teacher at the College of Wooster in Ohio. Two years later, he
returned to Rensselaer Polytechnic to teach physics, and threes
years after that, he accepted a chair at Johns Hopkins University.
Rowland's research helped to
demonstrate that electric currents are the source of
magnetic fields, to determine the value of
the Ohm (a unit of electrical resistance), and to
show that specific heat (the ability of a substance
of absorb heat as measured by the increase in
temperature per unit of heat absorbed) varies
with temperature. He became well known internationally
as a scientist when he invented a new spectral grating
that automatically focused light. This spectrograph, which
was more accurate than previous ones, won Rowland a gold
medal at the 1890 Paris Exposition. Rowland used this
invention to make the most precise measurements of
the spectral lines (unique characteristic colors of light
given off by specific atoms) in sunrays coming from
the Sun. He was elected to the National Academy of
Sciences, to the Royal Society of London and to the
French Academy of Sciences. As vice president of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science, he
advocated investment in pure science in spite of his own
success in applied physics. In 1899, Rowland became the
first president of the American Physical Society. He died in 1901.
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