EDWARD CHARLES PICKERING'

1846-1919

EDWARD CHARLES PICKERING was born in Boston on July 19, 1846, the son of Edward and Charlotte (Hammond) Pickering. He was a descendant of John Pickering, who came from England and settled in Salem in 1642, and a great-grandson of Timothy Pickering, Harvard graduate, soldier of the Revolution, Postmaster-General, Secretary of War and of State in the early years of the Republic. From the Boston Latin School he entered the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard, where his ability attracted the attention of his instructors, and upon his graduation in 1865 won him a place on the faculty in mathematics. Two years later he was called to the Thayer chair of physics in the recently organized Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Here the ideas of President Rogers, and during his illness the sympathetic execution of them by Acting President Runkle, were very favorable to the tastes and abilities which Pickering brought to the new field. Through the establishment of a chemical laboratory the study of chemistry had just been revolutionized; and when Pickering presented in full detail a plan for a physics laboratory on similar lines — a plan later highly commended by the great Tyndall — he met a cordial response, and settled down to the nine years' work whose fruits were the first working laboratory of physics in the United States. His universally commended textbook 'Physical Manipulation,' published in 1874, was another result of this period. While at work in his laboratory Pickering had made a special study of the light and spectra of the stars. The death of Joseph Winlock in 1875 left the chair of astronomy at Harvard vacant; and Pickering, whose genius for organization had been so well proved at the Institute of Technology, was called to occupy it, and appointed director of the Observatory, a position he was to hold with solid and brilliant success for the rest of his life. He was

* A memoir of Pickering by his fellow-worker at the Harvard Observatory, The Rev. Joel H. Metcalf, will be found in the Harvard Graduates' Magazine for June 1919.