Burton Edward Livingston

Background

Livingston was born on February 9, 1875, in Grand Rapids, United States, the youngest of six children of Benjamin Livingston and Keziah Lincoln. His paternal grandfather was a native of Ballybay, Ireland; the Lincolns were descended from early settlers of Massachusetts. Livingston's father was a street grading and sewer contractor in Grand Rapids, and the boy early became adept with tools. The family was intellectually inclined and possessed a good library in which he read extensively. He shared a family interest in gardening and wild plants and knew the scientific names of many plants before he knew their common names.

Education

Livingston graduated from the Grand Rapids high school, where he obtained an unusually broad training in science. In 1894 he entered the University of Michigan in 1894 and received his Bachelor of Science degree in 1898. In 1899 he began graduate study at the University of Chicago, where he was the first laboratory assistant of the well-known plant physiologist Charles Reid Barnes. He was greatly influenced also by Henry C. Cowles, who was developing the new field of plant ecology, and by the animal physiologist Jacques Loeb. In his research Livingston effectively combined ecology and physiology. He received his Doctor of Philosophy in 1901, and his influential dissertation "The Role of Diffusion and Osmotic Pressure in Plants" was published two years later.

Career

Livingston worked for a year with his brother in a large plant nursery in Short Hills, New Jesrsey and later as a teacher at high school science in Freeport, Illinois. After his graduate studies Livingston remained at Chicago as assistant and associate in plant physiology until 1905, when he accepted a post with the Bureau of Soils of the U. S. Department of Agriculture.

The following year he joined the new Desert Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of Washington at Tucson, Ariz. There, building on his primary interest in the water relations of plants, he investigated the complex interrelationships between plants and their environment. He was especially concerned with the watersupplying power of soil and the evaporating power of the air; and to assure accurate quantitative data he developed new measuring devices such as the porous porcelain atmometer to gauge evaporation.

Livingston visited several laboratories in the United States in 1907 and spent some time at the Missouri Botanical Garden studying transpiration of cacti. Most of 1908 was spent at various botanical laboratories in Europe. In 1909 Livingston moved to the Johns Hopkins University as professor of plant physiology, and in 1913 he became director of the university's laboratory of plant physiology, a position which he held until his retirement in 1940. The laboratory became a center to which both students and established scientists came from all over the world. The experiments conducted by Livingston and his students and associates, recorded in six books and nearly 280 published papers, studied the effects of numerous environmental factors--from radiation and temperature to air movement--on the physiological functions of plants.

Livingston was a clear and precise writer who spent much time editing the dissertations and papers of his students. He assisted in editing several scientific journals and exercised a strong influence on the content and style of the early volumes of Plant Physiology. He also edited an English translation of Vladimir I. Palladin's Plant Physiology in 1918. In 1921, with Forrest Shreve, he coauthored an important book, The Distribution of Vegetation in the United States, as Related to Climatic Conditions.

He died in Baltimore of cardiac insufficiency one day before his seventy-third birthday and was buried in Druid Ridge Cemetery, Baltimore County, Maryland.

Achievements

• Livingston contributed immensely to the foundations of modern physiological plant ecology. He invented standardized black and white atmometers to measure evaporation, autoirrigators to control the water supply of potted plants, soil point cones to measure the water-supplying power of the soil, and lithium chloride clips to measure transpiration. This equipment, which Livingston manufactured and sold to other laboratories, was used by ecologists and physiologists all over the world and played an important role in a variety of research projects.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Botanical Abstracts

    (Volumes 1-2)

  • The Rôle of Diffusion and Osmotic Pressure in Plants

    (Volume 8)

    1903
  • The Deccenial Publications Of the University of Chicago; The role of diffusion and osmotic pressure in plants
  • The Distribution of Vegetation in the United States, as Related to Climatic Conditions
  • The Water-Relation Between Plant and Soil
  • The Relation of Desert Plants to Soil Moisture and to Evaporation
  • Further Studies on the Properties of Unproductive Soils

Religion

Burton Edward attended a Congregational Sunday school as a boy, but he was never a churchgoer, and he had little patience with fundamentalist theologians who refused to accept the truth of obvious scientific facts.

Membership

• President

  American Society of Plant Physiologists , United States

  1934

• Permanent Secretary

  American Association for the Advancement of Science , United States

  1920 - 1931

Personality

Livingston was self-confident yet modest; he was exacting, yet easy to work with if one could meet his high standards in research and publication. Along with great energy and enthusiasm, he had the ability to get people to work for objectives which he regarded as important.

Connections

Livingston was married twice: in March 1905 to Grace Johnson of Chicago, and after their divorce in 1918, to Marguerite Anna Brennan Macphilips of Syracuse, New York, on July 2, 1921. He had no children by either marriage.

Father:

Benjamin Livingston

Mother:

Keziah Lincoln

Spouse:

Marguerite Anna Brennan Macphilips

ex-spouse:

Grace Johnson

colleague:

Henry Cowles

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography Volume 7
  1973