(Excerpt from The Mechanic Arts, Vol. 1
When Benjamin Fra...)
Excerpt from The Mechanic Arts, Vol. 1
When Benjamin Franklin was old enough to choose a vocation his father took him around to see all the trades then found in Boston; with the result that the boy decided to be a printer. The world, however, is too large, and industry too complicated, to permit the father to do that to-day. At the meeting of the National Educa tion Association in Boston in July, 1910, President Eliot said that the Life Career Motive, whether in school, or college, or life, is the motive under which we all do our best work. To bring the vocations home to the boys and girls, and help them to find this life career motive early, is the aim of these books.
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The Mechanic Arts: Ed. By Richard C. Maclaurin ... 1911
(Originally published in 1911. This volume from the Cornel...)
Originally published in 1911. This volume from the Cornell University Library's print collections was scanned on an APT BookScan and converted to JPG 2000 format by Kirtas Technologies. All titles scanned cover to cover and pages may include marks notations and other marginalia present in the original volume.
On the Nature and Evidence of Title to Realty: A Historical Sketch, Being the Yorke Prize Essay (1898), University of Cambridge 1901
(Originally published in 1901. This volume from the Cornel...)
Originally published in 1901. This volume from the Cornell University Library's print collections was scanned on an APT BookScan and converted to JPG 2000 format by Kirtas Technologies. All titles scanned cover to cover and pages may include marks notations and other marginalia present in the original volume.
The Theory of Light: A Treatise On Physical Optics; Volume 1
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Richard Cockburn Maclaurin was an American physicist.
Background
Richard Cockburn Maclaurin was born on June 5, 1870, at Lindean, Scotland. He was the son of the Rev. Robert Campbell Maclaurin and his wife Martha Joan (Spence) Maclaurin. The family was an ancient one in Scotland, the most famous representative of which was the mathematician Colin Maclaurin, the friend of Sir Isaac Newton and author of the Treatise on Fluxions (1742).
It was his brother John Maclaurin, one of the leading theologians of his day, who had some communications with Dr. Prince, pastor of the Old South Church in Boston, concerning the founding of the College of New Jersey. Robert Campbell Maclaurin was a minister of the Church of Scotland in a small parish near Edinburgh and a man of literary and scientific tastes.
Early in life, finding himself unable to subscribe to the tenets of his church, he resolved to make a new start in New Zealand. With his large family, he settled in a country district in Auckland where in the course of a few years he was appointed schoolmaster and had a house with a small farm.
Thus from the time, he was five years old, Richard grew up in New Zealand and got his early training there. Both parents were persons of unusual character and attainments and they and their twelve children made a remarkable household.
His mother, who was the daughter of a physician in Lerwick, Shetland, exerted a strong influence over his life. Although his constitution was never very robust, the boy took kindly to the outdoor life of a country farm and at the same time evinced an unusual aptitude for books and study.
Education
At school and afterward at college, Maclaurin was uniformly at the head of his class. When he was seventeen years old, he led the list of competitors of the whole colony for a scholarship in Auckland University College, and four years later, he had graduated from this college with the highest honors in physics and mathematics.
A scientific career seemed to be marked out for him. In 1892, he proceeded to the University of Cambridge. Winning scholarships in both Emmanuel College and St. John's College, he preferred to enter the latter on account of its high reputation in mathematics. He took the degree of bachelor of arts in this university in 1895, obtaining the highest rank in the most advanced mathematical examinations.
Returning to England in 1897, he was elected a fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, and was awarded the McMahon law studentship. During this period he also studied for six months at the University of Strassburg.
Career
In 1896-97, Maclaurin spent about a year in Canada where he taught for a short time at the University of Montreal and also began to study law. In the autumn of 1898, when he was only twenty-eight years old, he was called to take the chair of mathematics in the newly founded Victoria College of the University of New Zealand at Wellington.
He held this post until 1905 and during part of the time, he also gave courses of lectures in law without additional compensation. When the law school was established in 1905, he became dean of the faculty of law of the University of New Zealand. As a member of the University Senate, he strove to promote the advancement of general education throughout the colony, but his ideas were too far ahead of the rural communities around him.
In 1904, Cambridge University conferred on him the honorary degree of LL. D. in recognition of his original contributions in law. At the close of this year, December 27, 1904, he was married to Margaret Alice Young of Auckland. In 1907, he was invited to Columbia University in the city of New York to take the chair of mathematical physics that had been established for advanced researches in this field.
The opportunity of resuming his favorite scientific studies under such conditions was not to be resisted, and in February 1908, he gave his first lectures at Columbia University. His lectures on light given at the American Museum of Natural History during the winter of 1908-09 were published under that title by the Columbia University Press in 1909.
Although he was almost immediately made the head of the department of physics in Columbia University, he was not destined to remain long in New York. In the following autumn, he was chosen to succeed President Pritchett as the sixth president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and on June 7, 1909, when he was just thirty-nine years old, he was formally inaugurated in this office. Here he entered upon a notable career.
It was a critical period in the development of the school. It had outgrown its old habitations and was cramped for lack of space and facilities, while the demands for trained engineers in all the fields of industry and commerce were growing every year. The new president grasped the situation from the start and was able to stimulate enthusiasm and win support for his projects, for his wide knowledge, broad culture, and experience in two hemispheres "gave him a cosmopolitan quality that carried him over and through many obstacles. "
Within the short space of ten years, he had transferred the institute to its spacious new home across the river in Cambridge. Maclaurin had applied to become a citizen of the United States in 1913, but the World War followed in 1914, and he never severed his allegiance to his native country.
Four years later when the United States also was in the midst of the war, he was selected by the War Department at Washington to be the director of college training for the huge army that was being sent overseas and also for the select few who were to carry on war work at home in scientific fields.
(Originally published in 1901. This volume from the Cornel...)
Views
Maclaurin played a leading part in the prodigious task of organizing the Students Army Training Corps throughout all the American colleges, and it was largely due to his wisdom and tactfulness that the colleges were able to carry on in those distracting times and to resume their normal status practically unimpaired when the war ceased.
Doing double duty and beset with problems of the most complex kind, he was under a great strain until several months after the armistice was signed, and it is possible that his health was undermined a year before he died. While he did not live to see the fruition of all his dreams for the Institute of Technology to which he had given the best years of his life, "he saw his great endowment secure, his student body doubled, his faculty growing, and the inception of a plan which should give the school permanent and increasing funds and unexampled opportunities for usefulness".
One of the foremost scholars of his day, he was also a man of the broadest human sympathies. While slow to express his own views and eager to hear what others had to say, he formed his own decisions and was quick to detect sham in all its forms.
Connections
In 1904, Maclaurin married Alice Young of Auckland, and they had two sons.