Alfred Marshall Mayer was an American physicist. He made original contributions to acoustics and earned a reputation in Europe, filling a gap in late nineteenth-century American research in acoustics.
Background
Ethnicity:
Mayer's paternal side of the family was of Swiss, german and French ancestry. His mother was of Scotch-Irish blood.
Alfred Marshall Mayer was born on November 13, 1836, in Baltimore City, Maryland, United States to the family of Charles Frederick Mayer and Eliza Caldwell Blackwell. His father was a Senator of Maryland and attorney for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and other corporations of that day, and as a lawyer had for years maintained one of the most successful practices in the city. He also was a nephew of Brantz Mayer. His elder half-brother Francis Blackwell Mayer was a noted painter.
Education
Mayer studied classics at St. Mary’s College in Baltimore but left at the age of sixteen to become a machinist. From 1863 to 1865 he studied in Paris, notably under Regnault learning advanced physics, mathematics, and physiology. Mayer’s only academic degree was an honorary Doctor of Philosophy from Pennsylvania College of Gettysburg in 1866.
At sixteen Mayer became a machinist in the shop of a Baltimore engineer. Here and in the drafting-room, he worked for some two years, then began to acquire a small practice as an analytical chemist, and before he was nineteen published his first scientific paper, on a new apparatus for the determination of carbonic acid. This early work won the approval of Joseph Henry, through whose influence Mayer was appointed an assistant professor of physics and chemistry at the University of Maryland at the age of twenty, and two years later, to a similar position at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, in 1859. In 1865 he became a professor of physical sciences in Pennsylvania College, Gettysburg, and two years later was called to the chair of physics and astronomy at Lehigh University. Here he designed and equipped the astronomical observatory given to the university by Robert H. Sayre. Chosen to accompany the expedition sent out by the office of the United States Nautical Almanac to make observations of the solar eclipse of August 7, 1869, he directed the taking of some forty photographs with results accounted as remarkable in those early days of photography. He published observations of Jupiter (Journal of the Franklin Institute, August 1870) and a number of papers on electricity, heat, and magnetism. In 1871 he was invited to the newly founded Stevens Institute of Technology to organize and conduct the department of physics and was identified with that institution thenceforth until his death.
The exceptional instrumental equipment provided for him, together with proximity to New York, afforded him intellectual stimulus, and he began here the series of experiments on acoustics, reported in the American Journal of Science, 1872-1896, which made him "decidedly the leading authority on this subject in America."
During his quarter-century at Stevens, he published, in a dozen or more of the leading scientific magazines in America and Europe, fifty-four papers embodying the results of original research on subjects dealing mostly with sound, heat and light, gravity, and electricity. In addition, he devised a number of measuring instruments; wrote three books of a popular character: The Earth a Great Magnet (1872), Light (1877), with Charles Barnard, and Sound (1878); and prepared several articles for cyclopedias and technical journals. Between 1881 and 1889 he achieved a reputation as an amateur of outdoor sports. In 1890, moving from his country place near Maplewood, N. J. into the city, he resumed his activity in science and published some sixteen or seventeen papers before his death.
Mayer conducted research in sound, heat, light, and gravity, devised a number of instruments for scientific measurement; and was, the author of about one hundred publications, including fifty-four research articles and three scientific books. He was selected by the United States Nautical Almanac Office to direct the photographing of the solar eclipse of 7 August 1869; the results were considered remarkable for those early days of photography; a set of forty-two “perfect photographs,” made at exposures of 0·002 second - five of them during the eighty-three seconds of total eclipse. His major scientific work was in acoustics; Mayer’s Law gives a quantitative relation between pitch and the duration of residual auditory sensation. An avid sportsman, Mayer wrote widely about fishing and invented a rod with which.
Mayer is most remembered (and cited) for his experiments in which magnetized needles were inserted into corks, which were then floated on water with their south poles upward, under the north pole of a powerful electromagnet. Under these conditions, certain definite stable configurations were observed “which suggested the manner in which atoms of molecules may be grouped in the formation of definite compounds” and which illustrated various properties of the constitution of matter. These experiments won high praise from Kelvin and were later used by J. J. Thomson and others as a key to the way in which a characteristic number of electrons might be arranged within the atoms of each chemical element in relation to the periodic table. Mayer thus made a small but significant contribution to the theory of atomic structure.
Meyer was a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1872), the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
National Academy of Sciences
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United States
American Philosophical Society
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United States
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
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United States
Connections
Alfred Marshall Mayer was married in 1865 to Katherine Duckett Goldsborough, by whom he had one son, Alfred Goldsborough Mayor, who changed the spelling of the family name. After the death of his wife, he was married, in 1869, to Louisa Snowden. Two sons were born of the second marriage.