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William Jackson Humphreys was an American physicist and atmospheric researcher.
Background
Humphreys was born on February 3, 1862 in Gap Mills, West Virginia. He was the oldest of four children (two boys and two girls) of Andrew Jackson Humphreys, a farmer and miller, and Eliza Ann (Eads) Humphreys. His father was descended from Samuel Humphreys, a Scotch-Irish immigrant who settled in Pennsylvania in 1775 and moved on to Virginia. His maternal grandfather, whose family had come to Maryland about the time of the American Revolution, was a pioneer of the Gap Mills area. Eliza Humphreys was a "firm but kind" mother whose concern for her children's education strongly influenced William's career. At her urging, the family moved in 1880 to Pomeroy, Ohio, where a college-preparatory high school was available.
Education
Humphreys attended a college-preparatory high school for two years and then entered Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. , with financial assistance from relatives, including his uncle Milton Humphreys, a professor of Greek at Vanderbilt University. After receiving the degree of B. A. (1886) and C. E. (1888), he studied for a year at the University of Virginia, where he received "diplomas" in physics and chemistry.
Having paid back most of his financial debt to his family, Humphreys entered Johns Hopkins University in 1894 on a scholarship and pursued graduate work under the physicist Joseph S. Ames. With another student, he carried out extensive experiments on the effect of different gas pressures on the spectra produced by electric arcs, earning a Ph. D. in 1897. He also made significant investigations of the solution and diffusion of metals and alloys in mercury.
Career
From 1889 to 1893 he taught physics and mathematics at the nearby Miller School and then for a year was professor of science at Washington College in Maryland. Humphreys served for the eight years as an instructor in physics at the University of Virginia; during this time, at the invitation of the Naval Observatory, he also accompanied two eclipse expeditions, to Georgia in 1900 and to Sumatra the following year, to photograph the solar flash spectrum. When in 1905 the University of Virginia failed to promote Humphreys to a professorship, he reluctantly accepted an appointment with the U. S. Weather Bureau as meteorological physicist. This marked a turning point in his career from experimental physics to physical meteorology. His first assignment was as director of the newly established research observatory at Mount Weather on the crest of the Blue Ridge near Bluemont, Va. Scientists, however, ranked below forecasters in the Weather Bureau at that time, and Humphreys failed to receive promised support for his research.
In 1908 he was transferred to the bureau's central office in Washington, D. C. , where he remained until his retirement at the end of 1935. Besides supervising the Weather Bureau's seismological program (1914 - 1924) and editing the Monthly Weather Review (1931 - 1935), Humphreys pursued independent research on problems of atmospheric physics. Among these were the composition of the atmosphere, geoclimatic changes, radiational heat balance, the physics of evaporation and condensation and condensation forms, atmospheric circulations of all kinds, notably thunderstorms and tornadoes, and electrical and optical phenomena of many kinds. His most notable contribution was his explanation (1909) of the existence of the isothermal stratosphere as a necessary consequence of radiational equilibrium rather than of the convective equilibrium of the troposphere below the tropopause. The results of Humphreys' research were published in some 250 scholarly articles and in Physics of the Air (1920), which went through three editions. He also wrote several popular books on weather topics. From 1911 to 1933 Humphreys was a part-time professor of meteorological physics at George Washington University, the first college in America to offer a doctorate in meteorology as a separate discipline. He also served on the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.
He died in Washington, at the age of eighty-seven, of an infected tumor of the parotid gland and was buried in Charlottesville.
Achievements
His writing and teaching constituted a scientific oasis in American meteorology during two decades when there was otherwise only climatology and government forecasting.
(Baltimore 1926 1st Williams and Wilkins. Weather curiosit...)
Membership
He was general secretary of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1925 - 1928), president of the American Meteorological Society (1928 - 1929), national chairman of the American Geophysical Union (1932 - 1935), and president of the Cosmos Club in Washington (1936).
Personality
A portly, genial man, Humphreys had a sense of humor that pervaded even his scientific writings.
Connections
On January 11, 1908, he married Margaret Gertrude Antrim, daughter of a prosperous merchant of Charlottesville, Va. They had no children.
