Background
Elmer Peter Kohler was born on November 6, 1865 in Egypt, Pennsylvania, United States, where his ancestor, Jacob Kohler, an immigrant from Switzerland, had settled in 1728. Succeeding generations of Kohlers remained in Egypt as successful farmers, millers, and merchants, and young Elmer, the son of Lewis A. and Elizabeth (Newhardt) Kohler, learned the local methods of farming and practical mechanics and acquired the traditional friendly humor, frankness, frugality, and taste for simple ways of life characteristic of the Pennsylvania German farming folk of the Lehigh Valley.
Education
Kohler attended nearby Muhlenberg College at Allentown and in 1886 graduated with honors in the classical course. The thought of becoming an ore assayer led him to take up graduate study in chemistry, and he enrolled at Johns Hopkins. Working under the eminent chemist Ira Remsen, he developed a deep interest in organic chemistry and received the Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1892.
Career
Deciding at first to seek a career in the West, he served for a time as special passenger agent with the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad with the assignment of recruiting farming families from the Lehigh Valley region and settling them in the West.
Kohler's teaching career began that same year with an appointment as instructor at Bryn Mawr College, where he was the first to teach organic chemistry. He remained on the Bryn Mawr faculty for twenty years. He soon became productive in independent research; his first independent paper (on aliphatic sulfonic acids) appeared in 1897.
During his years at Bryn Mawr he published twenty-one papers based upon his own experimentation and twelve written in collaboration with students. He remained a bachelor--then and throughout his life. Kohler was called to Harvard in 1912, but his work there was interrupted by World War I.
At the outbreak of the war, in 1914, he went to Europe because, having had some experience with and interest in railroading, he was curious to observe the methods used in transporting troops and evacuating civilians. While he was held up in London waiting for passage home, his railroading experience was put to use by the British army, which appointed him special agent to expedite evacuation of neutrals from the war area.
Later in the war he was called to Washington and placed in charge of research for the Offense Section of the Chemical Warfare Service. This branch of the army's scientific work had been in a state of great confusion, but Kohler rapidly organized the section into a powerful and efficient unit.
He returned to academic work at Harvard in the fall of 1919. Though undergraduate and graduate teaching and eventually chairmanship of his department called heavily on his time, Kohler published during his years at Harvard eight papers of his own and eighty-two in collaboration with a total of seventy-one students. His laboratory was his greatest pleasure, and he spent many hours a week in research. As at Bryn Mawr, he was called on heavily for counsel on administrative matters; he reluctantly served in 1926 as acting dean of the graduate school.
His course in advanced organic chemistry was a classic, taken by every graduate student in chemistry who could obtain admission and subsequently widely copied by those who secured teaching posts. In laboratory work he had a faculty for guiding research into profitable channels while placing as much responsibility as possible on the shoulders of his students. His skill in fostering originality and independence resulted in a long succession of men and women trained by him who attained prominence in teaching and in academic and industrial research.
Kohler was appointed to the Abbott and James Lawrence Professorship in 1914 and became Sheldon Emery Professor of Organic Chemistry in 1934.
Personality
Shy by nature, Kohler felt no compulsion to spend his energies on activities foreign to his inborn ways of life and hence attended no meetings of the American Chemical Society and declined all invitations to give public lectures, though he encouraged colleagues to participate in such activities.
