Background

Ethnicity: King's ancestors came to the United States from England.

Clarence Rivers King was born on January 6, 1842, in Newport, Rhode Island, United States. His ancestors included Rhode Islanders distinguished in politics, business, and the arts. He was the son of Caroline Florence Little and James Rivers King, a Canton trader. His mother helped him with classical languages as a youth. His father and two siblings died in 1848, but the family business prospered until the Panic of 1857. In 1859 Mrs. King married a merchant who paid for her son’s college education.

King developed an early interest in outdoor exploration and natural history, which was encouraged by his mother and by Reverend Doctor Roswell Park.

Education

King attended Christ Church Hall school in Pomfret, Connecticut, until he was ten. He then attended schools in Boston and New Haven, and at age thirteen was accepted to the prestigious Hartford High School. He was a good student and a versatile athlete. Later he took the intensive chemistry course, which included James Dwight Dana’s geology lectures, at Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School from September 1860 to July 1862, when he graduated with a Bachelor of Philosophy degree. Between graduation and April 1863, King read further in geology and audited Louis Agassiz’s lectures on glaciers.

Career

King joined the California Geological Survey as an assistant from the fall of 1863 to the fall of 1866. He briefly studied the geology of Arizona as a scientific escort to a military road survey in the winter of 1865. From 1867 to 1878 he directed the U.S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, a study of topography, petrology, and geological history along the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroad lines. The twenty-five-year-old King had obtained this responsibility over the heads of four major generals. During May 1879 to March 1881 he was the first director of the U.S. Geological Survey, winning the appointment with the support of John Wesley Powell, who became his successor in 1881. King also led the mining investigations for the tenth census from May 1879 to May 1882. After resigning he worked as a mining geologist.

King’s scientific work may be arbitrarily divided into practical, descriptive, and theoretical units. In 1870 he outlined the Green River coal deposits and correctly predicted greater silver strikes in the Comstock lode, and in 1872 he exposed a diamond fraud. His descriptive work included mapping parts of the Sierra Nevada while on the California survey. In 1863 and 1864 he found fossils that dated the Mariposa gold-bearing slates as Jurassic, and in 1870 he discovered glaciers on Mount Shasta. King hired the microscopic petrographer Ferdinand Zirkle for the fortieth-parallel survey to prepare the first extensive monograph (1876) on American rocks studied in thin section. He also instructed his topographers to use the new triangulation methods developed on the California survey and to record their data on contour maps.

In 1880 King established Carl Barus’ laboratory as part of the U.S. Geological Survey to measure physical constants of rocks, and in 1893 he used Barus’ data for diabase to calculate the age of the earth’s crust. King’s calculation of twenty-four million years, based on Kelvin’s theory of the cooling of the earth, was a much shorter time than the uniformitarians had assumed. This figure was widely accepted until the concept of radioactive energy upset the basis of King and Kelvin’s work.

Achievements

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  Clarence King is considered one of the greatest geology scientists of the 19th century. As the first president of the U.S. Geological Survey, he was noted for his exploration of the Sierra Nevada, and also for his theoretical works on geology, the most famous and valuable being his volume of Systematic Geology. His ideas eventually helped theories such as diastrophism and neo-Lamarckianism to gain a hearing.
  
  Kings Peak in Utah, Mount Clarence King, and Clarence King Lake at Shastina, California are named in his honor, as is King Peak in Antarctica. The U.S. Geological Survey Headquarters Library in Reston, Virginia, is also known as the Clarence King Library.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Atlas Accompanying Volume III on Mining Industry 1870
  • Report Of The Geological Exploration Of The Fortieth Parallel 1878
  • Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada 1872
  • Statistics Of The Production Of The Precious Metals In The United States 1881
  • United States Mining Laws and Regulations Thereunder 1885
  • Report of the Public Lands Commission 1905

Religion

King's mother raised him as a Congregationalist.

Views

In 1877 King, faced with having to explain the geological past of the American West, promulgated a new catastrophist theory that employed more rapid rates of geological change than those operating on the present landscape. In 1878 he extended his theory to account for the source of volcanic lava: when very rapid erosion took place, decreased pressure allowed subcrustal local melting. He refined Ferdinand von Richthofen’s law of the succession of volcanic rocks by adding acid, neutral, and basic phases resulting from gravity separation in the magma chamber. His neocatastrophism led him to propose a modification of Darwin’s theory of biological evolution: natural selection explained biological change in geologically quiet times, but in revolutions only flexible organisms adapted and survived the rapid change in environment, while the others died out.

Membership

King was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1876, and was a founding member of the Geological Society of America, in addition to joining the American Philosophical Society and other scientific groups.

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  Member

  National Academy of Sciences , United States

  1876

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  Founding member

  Geological Society of America , United States

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  Member

  American Philosophical Society , United States

Personality

King lived a double life after the marriage: he pretended to be James Todd, a black railroad worker, when at home, and continued to work as King, a white geologist, when in the field. Throughout the marriage, King never revealed his true identity to his wife.

Physical Characteristics: King was of short stature but unusually strong. Despite rheumatism, malaria, and a spinal affliction, he was robust enough for strenuous fieldwork until 1893, when financial and personal worries culminated in a nervous breakdown. Near the end of his life he contracted tuberculosis.

Connections

In 1887 or 1888, King met and fell in love with Ada Copeland, an African American nursemaid (and former slave) from Georgia, who had moved to New York City in the mid-1880s. As miscegenation was illegal in many places, King hid his identity from Copeland. Despite his blue eyes and fair complexion, King convinced Copeland that he was an African-American Pullman porter named James Todd. The two entered into a common law marriage in 1888. Their union produced five children, four of whom survived to adulthood. Their two daughters married white men; their two sons served classified as blacks during World War I. King finally revealed his true identity to Copeland in a letter he wrote to her while on his deathbed in Arizona.

King was an intimate friend of John Hay and Henry Adams.

Father:

James Rivers King

Mother:

Caroline Florence Little

Spouse:

Ada Copeland

mentor:

Roswell Park

teacher:

James Dwight Dana

teacher:

Louis Agassiz

colleague:

John Wesley Powell

Friend:

John Hay

Friend:

Henry Adams

References

• Clarence King: A Biography
  1988
• The Explorer King: Adventure, Science, and the Great Diamond Hoax
  2007
• Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Volume 7
  1973