Charles Edward St. John was an American astronomer and educator. He studied the Sun, observing sun spots, the structure of the solar atmosphere, examined the Sun's element composition using spectroscopy, in all, published more than 80 papers.
Background
Charles was born at Allen, Michigan, United States, the son of Hiram Abiff and Lois Amanda (Bacon) St. John, the youngest of the six children, four boys and two girls, who survived infancy. He was a descendant of Matthias St. John, who emigrated to Dorchester, Massachussets, in 1631-32, and later lived in Windsor, Wethersfield, and Norwalk, Connecticut Charles's grandfather moved from Connecticut to New York, and his parents from there to Michigan in 1850. His father was a millwright.
Education
Financial stringency increased the difficulties of his early years, but he graduated at the Michigan State Normal School in 1876 and served there from 1885 to 1892 as instructor in physics and chemistry, receiving in 1887 the degree of B. S. from the Michigan Agricultural College.
Supporting himself by teaching, he pursued graduate studies in electricity and magnetism at the University of Michigan and later at Harvard University, where he received the degree of A. M. in 1893 and was awarded the Tyndall Fellowship, which enabled him to spend a year in study at Berlin and Heidelberg. In 1896 he received the degree of Ph. D. at Harvard.
Career
After studies St. John he served as instructor in physics at the University of Michigan. In 1897 he was appointed associate professor of physics and astronomy at Oberlin College, was made professor in 1899, and became dean of the College of Arts and Sciences in 1906, a position which he held until 1908.
In teaching and educational administration his constructive influence was based on scholarship, a vision of the place of science in modern life, and an ability to impart his own enthusiasm to others. He was convinced that true social progress must involve the intelligent application of the scientific method in fields apart from formal science.
At the age of thirty, he was coauthor of a scientific paper, which appeared in the Botanical Gazette, his only known work outside the field of the physical sciences.
While still a graduate student he had published a few papers on heat radiation and on electromagnetic phenomena, but he had no active contact with the problems of astrophysics until 1898.
In 1908 he was appointed to the staff of the Mount Wilson Observatory of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, at Pasadena, California, and thereafter devoted his energies to the field of pure research. To the development of the observatory, still in the pioneer stage, St. John contributed through his technical investigations, often in collaboration with other staff members, and through cooperation and leadership in the International Astronomical Union. Results of his work were set forth in numerous papers and reports which appeared chiefly in the Astrophysical Journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Transactions of the International Astronomical Union.
His conclusions were published in the Astrophysical Journal, April 1928, under the title "Evidence for the Gravitational Displacement of Lines in the Solar Spectrum Predicted by Einstein's Theory. " In collaboration with other members of the staff he prepared Revision of Rowland's Preliminary Table of Solar Spectrum Wave-Lengths, with an Extension to the Present Limit of the Infra-Red (1928), a work that supplied an important need in astrophysics. Upon his retirement in 1930 he was made research associate of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and continued to work in Pasadena. He was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences, 1924, and to associateship in the Royal Astronomical Society, 1917.
St. John died of pneumonia in his seventy-ninth year.
Views
He studied mainly the atmosphere of the sun, its physical and chemical nature, and its rotation, primarily by means of spectroscopy. An observer rather than a theorist, but clearly cognizant of the interdependence of the two fields, he looked at nature to discern underlying causes, not merely to collect facts.
Membership
He was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences, 1924, and to associateship in the Royal Astronomical Society, 1917.
