Calvin Winsor Rice

Background

Calvin Winsor Rice, the only child of Edward Hyde and Lucy J. (Staples) Rice, was born on November 4, 1868 at Winchester, Massachussets.

Education

He attended public schools in Winchester, Boston, and New Haven, and graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1890 with the degree of B. S. in electrical engineering.

From the Technische Hochschule of Darmstadt, Germany, he received the honorary degree of doctor of science in 1926.

Career

He had found a position with the Thomson-Houston Electric Company at Lynn, Massachussets, and he continued with it and its successor, the General Electric Company, for more than five years, being transferred to the plant of the latter in Schenectady, New York, and later to its branch in Cincinnati.

In 1895-96 he was engineer for the Silver Lake Mines in Colorado and subsequently consulting engineer with the Anaconda Copper Mining Company in Montana. In 1898 he became engineer for the Kings County Electric Light & Power Company in Brooklyn, and, soon after, electrical engineer of the Consolidated Telegraph & Electric Subways Company, as well as chief of meter and testing departments of the New York Edison Company.

He became second vice-president and sales manager of the Nernst Lamp Company in 1903 and so continued for some years thereafter. From 1904 to 1906 he was consulting engineer for the General Electric Company. In 1906 he was made secretary of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, which position he held until his death. In 1902 he and Charles F. Scott, president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, persuaded Andrew Carnegie to provide the money to erect a headquarters and club building for the four great engineering societies in New York, on condition that the societies undertake to buy the site.

Rice was chairman of the building fund which made possible the creation of the handsome, fifteen-story Engineering Societies Building, with its library and auditorium. He was to a considerable extent responsible for the existence of the Officers' Reserve Corps of the United States army. He advocated such a branch of the service in a communication to the chief of staff in 1902, and continued to exert pressure in its behalf until a provision for it was written into the army reorganization bill in 1916. Rice himself was commissioned a major in the corps in 1922 and a lieutenant-colonel in 1929. On a visit to Westminster Abbey in 1910 he noticed that there was only one window in the building which was not a memorial. He suggested that a tribute to Lord Kelvin be placed there, and, upon receiving permission, arranged to have the memorial window provided by the engineering societies of England and America.

Rice was a constant laborer for international understanding, through the Pan-American Union, the Committee on Friendly Relations among Foreign Students, and other mediums. He was a member of the jury of awards at the Panama-Pacific Exposition at San Francisco in 1915. With others, he was responsible for the establishment of the New York Museum of Science and Industry in 1914.

In addition to his other activities, he was secretary of the Museums of Peaceful Arts, national counselor of the Purdue Research Foundation, and a fellow and vice-president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.

For many years he made his home in Montclair, New Jersey. He was stricken at his desk in New York and died at a hospital a few hours later.

Achievements

• He was a prominent engineer. Brazil gave him a gold medal at its Centennial Exposition in 1922; Czechoslovakia bestowed upon him the knight cross of the Order of the White Lion, and Bavaria the Golden Ring of Honor. At the meeting of the Verein Deutscher Ingenieure held at Cologne in 1931 a medal of honor was presented to him, "in appreciation of his services to technical-scientific achievement, particularly in promoting the mutual international interests of the engineers of the entire world. "

Membership

For many years he was a member of the Corporation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and chairman of the visiting committee of its department of mechanical engineering.

He was an honorary member of the Argentine unit of the National Engineering Societies; of the Koninklijk Instituut van Inginieurs of Holland; of the Club de Engenharia of Rio de Janeiro; of the American Society of Safety Engineers; of the Masaryk Academy of Czechoslovakia and of the Deutsches Museum of Dresden, Germany.

Connections

On August 6, 1904, he married Ellen M. Weibezahn of Winchester, Massachussets, who, with two children, Edward Winslow and Marjorie Charlotte, survived him.

Father:

Edward Hyde Rice

Mother:

Lucy J. (Staples) Rice

Spouse:

Ellen M. Weibezahn

Daughter:

Marjorie Charlotte

Son:

Edward Winslow