(Excerpt from Growth of Plants: Twenty Years' Research at ...)
Excerpt from Growth of Plants: Twenty Years' Research at Boyce Thompson Institute The Founder of the Boyce Thompson Institute Aims and Scope of Work of the Institute Organization and Purpose of Book Acknowledgments. 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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William Crocker was born on January 27, 1874 in Montville, Ohio, United States. Of nine children, William and his twin sister, Nell, were considerably younger than their brothers and sisters. His father, a skillful woodsman and barn framer, was a descendant of Deacon Job Crocker who settled in Barnstable, Massachussets, in the early seventeenth century. Relations in the Crocker family were not entirely happy, and Crocker left home at the age of fourteen.
He attended the preparatory school of Baldwin University (Berea, Ohio) and was graduated from the Illinois Normal University in 1898. He entered the University of Illinois, where he received a B. A. degree in 1902 and a M. A. in 1903. He received his Ph. D. in 1906.
For ten years, beginning at the age of nineteen, he taught in country schools.
After teaching biology for two years at the Northern Illinois Normal School he began work in botany at the University of Chicago. While there, he came under the influence of John Merle Coulter, in whose department he worked; first as a graduate student, as an assistant in 1906, and as an associate professor from 1915-1921. From 1913-1918 he was also plant physiologist and collaborator at the U. S. Department of Agriculture.
When Colonel William Boyce Thompson, the mining magnate, donated over $10 million to establish a laboratory for the study of plants in Yonkers, New York, Crocker was appointed director (February 1921). He and Dr. John Arthur visited research laboratories in the United States and Europe, purchased books for a library, and assembled a staff; in the fall of 1924, the Boyce Thompson Institute, designed for research in plant physiology, plant pathology, and biochemistry, was opened.
In addition to planning, building, organizing, and administering the institute, he carried on a program of research and, in his later years, devoted considerable time to local and national affairs. His major concern in research was the physiology of seed plants; and he was inclined to attack problems of practical importance.
An endeavor, on which he had been associated with Percy White Zimmerman and Albert Edwin Hitchcock, to determine the cause of injury to greenhouse-grown carnations led to the discovery of the toxicity to plants of illuminating gas and to studies on the effects of ethylene and various other gases, such as carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and mercury vapor, on plant life. Equally important were his studies on the dormancy and germination of seeds; he discovered a method of increasing the yield of hybrid rose seeds and a number of tree seeds. He was concerned with fertilizers (especially sulfur and iron), plant hormones, and the factors influencing the distribution of water plants which serve as duck food.
Crocker was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of other notable organizations.
Crocker also devoted much time to public service. He was a member of the Yonkers Board of Education for nine years, during seven of which he was president, and he served on many local committees. He served as chairman of the Division of Biology and Agriculture of the National Research Council.
He was buried in Marietta, Ohio.
He developed a method of preserving in storage seeds that would not last from year to year otherwise. Crocker was president of the Botanical Society of America in 1924. In 1932 he received a medal from the Institute of Arts and Sciences of New York and, with Zimmerman and Hitchcock, the A. Cressy Morrison prize in experimental biology from the New York Academy of Science, for initiation and stimulation of roots from exposure of plants to carbon monoxide.
(Excerpt from Growth of Plants: Twenty Years' Research at ...)
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He was a member of the Advisory Committee on Gerontology of the U. S. Public Health Service.
Crocker was a big, handsome man with a great capacity for work.
Crocker combined the qualities of an honest, critical and imaginative scientist with the leadership and business sense of a great administrator.
He married Persis Dorothy Smallwood of Warsaw, New York, on September 3, 1910; they had two sons: John Smallwood, born in 1911, and David Rockwell, born in 1916. On February 11, 1950, a year and a half after his first wife's death, Crocker married Neva Ray Brown Ankenbrand in Marietta, Ohio.
