Thomas Messinger Drown

Thomas Messinger Drown.

Thomas Messinger Drown (March 19, 1842 – November 17, 1904) was the fourth University President of Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA. He was also an analytical chemist and metallurgist.^[1]

Background

He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1842. He graduated from the high school in Philadelphia in 1859,^[2] and then went on to study medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and graduated in 1862. He went abroad to Germany to study chemistry in Freiberg, Saxony, and mining at the University of Heidelberg. From 1869 to 1870 he was an instructor of metallurgy at Harvard University. In 1870, he started a consulting business in Philadelphia.^[3] In 1872, he hired a former student, John Townsend Baker, as an assistant.^{[citation needed]} From 1874 to 1881, he was professor of Analytical Chemistry at Lafayette College.^[2] Baker followed him to Lafayette and later would found the J. T. Baker Chemical Co., which merged with Mallinckrodt and was absorbed and spun off of Tyco International as a component company of Covidien.^{[citation needed]}

His professional career was interrupted in 1881, when, after the death of his father, he devoted himself to family matters. He restarted his professional work in 1885 by accepting a professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.^[3]

Massachusetts activity

He helped start MIT’s chemical engineering curriculum in the late 1880s. In 1887, he was appointed by the newly formed Massachusetts Board of Health to a landmark study of sanitary quality of the state's inland waters. As consulting chemist to the Massachusetts State Board of Health, he was in charge of the famous Lawrence Experiment Station laboratory conducting the water sampling, testing, and analysis. There he put to work the environmental chemist and first female graduate of MIT, Ellen Swallow Richards. This research created the famous "normal chlorine" map of Massachusetts that was the first of its kind and was the template for others. As a result, Massachusetts established the first water-quality standards in America, and the first modern sewage treatment plant was created.

As a professor, Drown published a number of papers on metallurgy, mostly in Transactions of the American Institute of Mining Engineers. He was a founding member of the Institute,^[2] and served as its secretary, and editor of its Transactions from 1871 till 1884. He was elected its president in 1897.

Lehigh presidency

In 1895 he left MIT to become the fourth President of Lehigh University. Lehigh's endowment was predominantly in the stock of the major company of its founder, Asa Packer's Lehigh Valley Railroad. The Panic of 1893 crashed the market, brought the country into depression that lasted years, and nearly brought the university to financial insolvency. Many prominent railroads such as the Northern Pacific Railway, the Union Pacific Railroad and the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad went into bankruptcy, and over 15,000 companies and 500 banks failed. In order to gain new sources of funding, President Drown broke the university's ties with the Episcopal Church in 1897, qualifying the university for aid from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. During his term, which started during a major financial crisis, he was able to save Lehigh from bankruptcy, grow enrollment, grow academics, and build. Williams Hall was completed. The curriculum leading to a degree in arts and engineering was established, as was the department of zoology and biology. New curricula were adopted in metallurgical engineering, geology, and physics. In 1904, Dr Drown died, effectively ending his term.

In 1908, Lehigh University opened up Drown Hall which now houses Lehigh's English Department.

References

External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Thomas Messinger Drown

• "About Lehigh - Past to Present - Past Presidents"
• "Lehigh inaugurations bridge past, future"
• "SERMON IN STONE" Packer Memorial Church: An Historical Essay
• "Purity by the ounce" J. T. Baker’s dissatisfaction with flawed research material refined the chemical industry.
• "Tributes to Ellen Swallow Richards" From Technology Review, vol. 13, 1911, pp. 365–373
• "MIT Scientists Play Major Roles in the Early Work of the Station" includes picture of Dr Drown
• "autographed photograph of him"
• "another photograph"