Background
Joseph Lovering was born on December 25, 1813 in Charlestown, Massachusetts, United States, the son of Robert and Elizabeth (Simonds) Lovering.
Joseph Lovering was born on December 25, 1813 in Charlestown, Massachusetts, United States, the son of Robert and Elizabeth (Simonds) Lovering.
Lovering graduated from Harvard as the fourth scholar in his class, in 1833. In 1834 he entered the Divinity School at Cambridge with the purpose to prepare himself for the ministry and remained in the school for two years. In 1879 he received the degree of Doctor of Laws from Harvard College.
During 1833 Lovering was a teacher in the private school in Charlestown. Later he became an assistant teacher of mathematics in Harvard college, and in the year 1835-1836 for a time conducted morning and evening prayers in the college chapel. These temporary engagements led to his appointment as lecturer in natural philosophy and in 1838 he was appointed to the Hollis professorship. The same qualities, mental, moral, and physical, that would have made him an impressive preacher made him, for his time, a much respected professor of natural science, and with respect a considerable measure of affection was mingled. At the same time, people were likely to smile when they mentioned him, for some of his rather infrequent remarks were witty and some of his unchanging ways were odd. He was highly praised by eminent men as a lecturer, stating the facts and laws of science with lucidity and grave oratorical effect, illustrating them by carefully prepared experiments. In the classroom, on the other hand, he seems to have followed in its most extreme form the then prevailing habit of setting for his students definite lessons to be learned and recited in the exact words of the textbook.
Despite the limitations of his experimental work, Lovering wrote a paper "On a New Method of Measuring the Velocity of Electricity", describing a procedure which apparently he had devised. The method he employed gave no information of importance, but as evidence of the will of an old-fashioned teacher, in his sixty-second year, to break ground in what was for him a novel field of experimental research, it is of considerable importance. He produced, it appears, no books, but he did much editorial work, especially for the Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He retired in 1888.
Quotations: "The reason why the undulatory theory of light is now universally accepted is that the people who formerly held the corpuscular theory are all dead. "
Lovering was elected the president (1880 - 1892) of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was a permanent secretary of the American Association for the Advancement of Science from 1854 to 1873 and president for the year 1873.
Lovering was frugal in his way of life and not disposed to follow changing fashions. He never would quarrel, and, as he once said, it takes two to make a quarrel and the other man only counts one. He had a fund of dry humor, which not only enlivened intercourse, but often gave force to an argument.
In 1844 Lovering married Sarah Gray Hawes of Boston, and of this marriage came two sons and two daughters.