(Excerpt from The Elements of Geodetic Astronomy: For Civi...)
Excerpt from The Elements of Geodetic Astronomy: For Civil Engineers This book was written for the students in the course in civil engineering at the Ohio State University and to put in permanent form the author's manner of presenting this subject. After an experience of over sixteen years in teaching geodetic astronomy to engineering students, he is firmly convinced of the value of this subject as a training for the young engineer. Practical astronomy gives, as nothing else does, experience in precise meas urement and in handling long and intricate calculations. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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Henry Curwen Lord was born on April 17, 1866 in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States, the son of Henry Clark and Eliza Burnet (Wright) Lord. His grandfather, Reverend Nathan Lord, was president of Dartmouth College from 1828 to 1863, and his father, a prominent citizen of Cincinnati and at one time a railroad president.
Henry studied at Ohio State University from 1884 to 1887, and then entered the University of Wisconsin, from which he graduated in 1889.
Lord started his career as an assistant at the Washburn Observatory of the University of Wisconsin. Later he engaged for a short time in electrical work, but in 1891 he joined the faculty of Ohio State University, as assistant in mathematics and astronomy. On leave of absence in 1893, he was astronomer for the Alaskan Boundary Survey. He was promoted through the various ranks to a professorship in astronomy (1900).
In the meantime, 1895, he had become director of the observatory which Emerson McMillin built and equipped. In connection with this enterprise, Lord was sent East to visit observatories and instrument makers. The building and complete equipment for instruction were the first considerations, but there were sufficient funds to warrant a 121/2-inch equatorial and a spectroscope for research. The spectroscope was designed by Lord, following the best features of the Lick and Potsdam instruments, and was built by him, as well as most of the other accessory apparatus, largely to minimize expense, but also, apparently, because of a fondness for mechanical work, in which he was skilled. As a line of research he took up the measurement of the radical velocities of stars, feeling his way along in this new field as others were doing. He published careful and specific directions for focussing a telescope accurately on the slit of a spectroscope and a derivation of Scheiner's formula for the curvature of spectral lines.
In 1897 he adopted a suggestion of Keeler's and had a compound correcting lens made for use with the visual objective to flatten the color curve. In 1898 he made his first detailed report on the radical velocities of stars. His observing program was necessarily limited to the brighter stars because the telescope was small and the observatory was "located within the limits of a city of 150, 000 population, where soft coal is used extensively. " The preliminary probable error of 2 km. sec. was satisfactorily small. Distressed at his inability to photograph the faint iron lines in stars of type I, he developed a graphical comparison of the effects on the efficiency of spectroscopes resulting from the variation of any one of the several elements that enter into their optical design. The final results of ten years of work on radical velocities was published in 1905 when he had decided to give up this line of research "in view of the optical giants at work in this branch of research today, and in further consideration of the fact that our sky . .. is yearly getting worse. "
He also published some observations of double stars. His optical studies included the testing of various kinds of glass for prisms; the statement and proof of a relation which must be satisfied in order that a symmetrical photographic doublet of four separated thin lenses may be free from the errors of achromatism and astigmatism; and the formulation for the illumination of the field of a photographic doublet. He was the author of The Elements of Geodetic Astronomy for Civil Engineers (1904). This he printed himself on a hand printing-press.
Henry Curwen Lord was known for his design of spectroscope. He made a great contribution to astronomy with his observations on the radical velocities of stars. In May 1900 he also observed with the United States Naval Observatory eclipse expedition and obtained one of the early successful photographs of the flash spectrum.
(Excerpt from The Elements of Geodetic Astronomy: For Civi...)
In 1898 Lord married Edith Lelia Hudson of Middleport, Ohio, by whom he had one child, a daughter.
