Ogden N. Rood (1831–1902). Image from Notable New Yorkers of 1896-1899: a companion volume to King's handbook of New York City (1899) by Moses King.
School period
College/University
Gallery of Ogden Rood
Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany
From 1854 to 1858 he was in Germany studying physics and chemistry at Berlin and Munich under Liebig, Magnus, and Dove, and at the same time devoting much of his leisure to the cultivation of painting and music, for both of which he had talent.
Gallery of Ogden Rood
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, United States
Young Rood studied at the College of New Jersey (Princeton), where he graduated in 1852.
Gallery of Ogden Rood
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Munich, Bavaria, Germany
From 1854 to 1858 he was in Germany studying physics and chemistry at Berlin and Munich under Liebig, Magnus, and Dove.
Career
Gallery of Ogden Rood
Ogden Nicholas Rood (3 February 1831 in Danbury, Connecticut – 12 November 1902 in Manhattan) was an American physicist best known for his work in color theory.
Ogden Nicholas Rood (3 February 1831 in Danbury, Connecticut – 12 November 1902 in Manhattan) was an American physicist best known for his work in color theory.
From 1854 to 1858 he was in Germany studying physics and chemistry at Berlin and Munich under Liebig, Magnus, and Dove, and at the same time devoting much of his leisure to the cultivation of painting and music, for both of which he had talent.
Ogden Nicholas Rood was an American physicist and chemist, and amateur artist, who combined his professional knowledge with his hobby in a remarkably successful volume called "Modern Chromatics with Applications to Art and Industry."
Background
Ethnicity:
Ogden Rood's ancestors from his father's side were of Scottish origin.
Ogden Nicholas Rood was born on February 3, 1831, in Danbury, Connecticut, the son Reverend Anson Rood and Alida Gouverneur (Ogden). His father was a Congregational clergyman whose ancestors, of Scottish origin, had settled in Massachusetts in early colonial days; and his mother, daughter of Uzal Ogden and a descendant of John Ogden who was one of the founders of Elizabeth, New Jersey, belonged to an aristocratic family of New York.
Education
Young Rood entered Yale College at seventeen years of age, but soon afterward transferred to the College of New Jersey (Princeton), where he graduated in 1852.
Already he had begun to show a predilection for experimental science; and during the next two years, except for several months at the University of Virginia, he pursued a postgraduate course in the new Sheffield Scientific School at Yale.
From 1854 to 1858 he was in Germany studying physics and chemistry at Berlin and Munich under Liebig, Magnus, and Dove, and at the same time devoting much of his leisure to the cultivation of painting and music, for both of which he had talent.
Returning to the United States with his bride in 1858, Rood accepted the post of professor of chemistry in a small denominational college at Troy, New York. Here, despite an uncongenial environment and scant facilities, he threw himself into his new work with enthusiasm and during the five or six years he was at Troy contributed a series of notable papers to the American Journal of Science.
These studies included investigations of the polarization of light produced by the passage of light through a block of glass that had been strained in the process of annealing, the after-images that are perceived by looking at a bright surface through the open sectors of a revolving disk and the connection between the sensation of color and the persistence of vision, stereoscopic phenomena, especially stereoscopic lustre (which he had begun to study in Germany under Dove), photography and the duration of electric sparks, and spectrometry. He was one of the first to adopt the microscope to photography and to take binocular pictures with that instrument.
In 1864 he was made a professor of physics at Columbia College, New York City, and here spent the rest of his life, becoming identified with the institution as one of its leading spirits and soon being recognized as one of the foremost scientific investigators of his day. He had little taste for the complicated problems of mathematical physics; on the other hand, he had a positive genius for experimenting and a consummate ingenuity in the use of simple contrivances for obtaining results of the highest precision and value. While Rood was always keenly interested in optics, especially in physiological optics, there is scarcely any part of the physics of his generation that he did not touch and enrich by his work. He was continually improving old methods and devising new ones.
His modification of the Sprengel air pump enabled him to produce and measure high vacua far in excess of any that had been obtained before.
An exceedingly important experimental device that he developed is the flicker photometer by which the brightness of the light of different colors can be compared; this instrument has become indispensable in heterochromatic photometry.
Towards the end of his life, Rood investigated with characteristic curiosity and ingenuity the properties of the X-rays discovered by Röntgen in 1895. During these latter years also he devised a remarkable method of measuring prodigiously great electrical resistances. In 1879 he published a notable book entitled Modern Chromatics with Applications to Art and Industry, which was translated into French, German, and Italian and soon after republished in England. It contains the mature conclusions and results of the author's numerous contributions to the physics of the color sensations and has become almost a classic in its field. For "lucidity and simplicity of treatment" and for the admirable style in which it is written, it deserves to be ranked with Helmholtz's popular scientific lectures or with Tyndall's Heat (1863) and Sound (1867).
The difficult subject of color and color-mixing is treated from both the standpoint of the physicist and that of the artist, and it is this rare combination that lends the book so much charm and gives it so much authority.
Quotations:
"Color is but a sensation and has no existence outside the nervous system of living beings."
"The advance from drawing to painting should be gradual, and no serious attempts in colour should be made until the student has obtained proficiency in outline and in light and shade. If the artist cannot draws objects in a rather masterly way there is no point in his attempting colour."
Membership
In 1865, soon after the foundation of the National Academy of Sciences, Ogden Rood was elected a member of that body. He was an honorary member of the American Water Colour Society and at the annual meetings, his paintings were frequently on exhibition. He was also a member and a vice-president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Personality
Rood has been described as "striking in appearance and in manners, possessing and possibly affecting certain peculiarities, working behind locked doors, sometimes living with his family and sometimes not, in part a recluse, although not averse to congenial company or an evening at the Century Club."
Quotes from others about the person
"He delighted in the tour de force required to push the sensibility of an apparatus to its limit or in the invention of some novel device for determining the hitherto unmeasurable.
At one time he devised a means for determining details which the microscope failed to reveal; at another, he modified and defined Bunsen's photometric device so as to greatly enhance its sensitiveness.
Where Wheatstone measured intervals of time not greater than a millionth of a second, he carried the determination to times as much smaller relatively as a quarter of a minute is smaller than an hour."
Interests
art, painting
Connections
Rood married Mathilde Prunner of Munich and returned with her to the United States in 1858.