Background

John Locke was born on February 19, 1792 at Lempster, New Hampshire, the son of Samuel Barron Locke and his first wife, Hannah Russell. He was descended from William Locke who emigrated to Massachusetts from England in 1635, settling first at Charlestown, and then at Woburn. For the first few years of his life Locke lived in a number of places but in 1796 his father settled on a large tract near Bethel, Maine, and in connection with his home and farm, built saw and grist mills, a Methodist meeting house, and other establishments. In time the settlement came to be known as Locke's Mills.

Education

Locke received his early schooling at Bethel, Maine which was augmented by the books of his father's large library. He became intensely interested in botany, learned as much as he could locally, and then by working in the mills and by teaching school earned enough money to attend intermittently an academy at Bridgeport, Connecticut. The smattering of additional knowledge of the natural sciences he received only made him more desirous for an education, but his father opposed his ambitions. In the summer of 1815, following a bitter religious quarrel with his father, Locke left home and worked his way to Yale College. There he attended Silliman's lectures on chemistry and was an assistant in his laboratory. Then from 1816 to 1818 he studied medicine under several doctors in Keene, New Hampshire. In 1819 he obtained the degree of Doctor of Medicine at Yale.

Career

Locke started his career as a teacher delivering lectures on botany in various schools and colleges of New England. In the autumn of 1818 Locke received an appointment of assistant surgeon in the United States navy and was assigned to the frigate Macedonian under special order to explore the Columbia River. A storm wrecked the ship, however, and the expedition was abandoned. Locke then went to Boston, where he wrote and published in 1819 his Outlines of Botany. It contained over two hundred illustrations, all drawn and engraved by himself.

For a time then he was curator of botany at Harvard College, but in 1821 he seized the opportunity of getting away from New England, which he felt was dominated by religious intolerance, and accepted a teaching position in a girls' school in Lexington, Kentucky. After a year he resigned this position and went to Cincinnati, Ohio, and established there the Cincinnati Female Academy which he conducted until 1835. He then was appointed professor of chemistry and pharmacy in the Medical College of Ohio in Cincinnati and very successfully occupied this chair for eighteen years, resigning in 1853, just three years before his death.

By far the most productive years of his life were those from 1835 onward. In this period his interests and his researches gradually changed from the natural to the physical sciences and it was in the latter field that he did his foremost work. Between 1835 and 1840 he engaged in some private geologic and paleontologic studies, publishing the results in scientific journals. These studies included observations on the characteristics of certain species of fossil trilobites and on the occurrence of certain unusual ore deposits. Locke was employed, too, for geological survey work by both the state of Ohio and the federal government. One of his subsequent reports on the mineral lands of Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin was published by Congress in 1840 and republished in enlarged form in 1844.

After 1840 his attention was directed to the study of terrestrial magnetism and electricity. He also lectured both in the United States and in England, using for illustration scientific apparatus of his own and his son's design and construction.

He invented several valuable instruments including a surveyor's compass, level, an orrery, and his socalled electromagnetic chronograph. This instrument, devised between 1844 and 1848, at the request of the United States Coast Survey, completely changed the art of determining longitudes, for it recorded on a time scale, automatically printed by a clock, the occurrence of an event to within one one-hundredth of a second. Furthermore it could be connected with the nation's telegraph system so that an observer of an astronomical event anywhere, by the simple depression of a key, could record the time of the event as indicated by the clock to which the instrument was attached. Locke's instruments and system were installed in the Naval Observatory, Washington, in 1848, with wonderful results. He died in Cincinnati in 1856.

Achievements

• Locke was the founder of the Cincinnati Female Academy in Cincinnati, Ohio. He contributed over fifteen papers on scientific subjects to the American Journal of Science and Arts, to the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, and to the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge. Specializing in magnetism, he became an expert in the field and invented and improved numerous scientific instruments relating to magnetism. For his inventions, Congress awarded him $10, 000 in February 1849.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Outlines of Botany: Taken Chiefly From Smith's Introduction; Containing an Explanation of Botanical Terms and an Illustration of the System of ... of Physiology of Vegetables (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Outlines of Botany: Taken Chiefly From Smith...)

  • Observations on terrestrial magnetism Volume 3, no. 1

    (This historic book may have numerous typos and missing te...)

  • Dr. John Locke, early Ohio scientist (1792-1856)

Connections

Locke married Mary Morris of Newark, New Jersey, on October 25, 1825, in Cincinnati.

Father:

Samuel Barron Locke

Mother:

Hannah Russell

Spouse:

Mary Morris