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[PA-BIO] New member's interest - picture of unknown WW2 Sailor

2007-06-03T04:43:00-06:00

Hi List,

Please take a moment and have a look at the picture of this WW2 Sailor - do
you know who he is?

http://gallerychristine.photoblog.co.uk

He 'may' have served on the USS CHICAGO or the USS HELENA.
He may have been a friend of Mack GALLIMORE from Denton, NC, who served on
both these ships, up to when the ships were sunk.

I would like to send the original picture to his surviving family.

Any information/ideas/assistance would be most welcomed!

Regards,

Christine

John Warner

2006-06-18T09:55:08-06:00

To any WARNER"S etc.

Are there any WARNER's out there that may have come across the following
family in their research that might help regarding concrete evidence of a
William Warner's birth parents.

John Warner b. about 1768 ( USA or Germany) died March 29, 1827
in Northampton County, Pennsylvania
He was married to a CATHERINE abt. 1790. She was born abt 1770
in the USA and died March 29, 1848.
According to research, John Warner had lived in Mt. Bethel, Northampton
Co. from 1801 to about 1819.
Before the time in Mt Bethel one son Jacob was born in 1791

During the time in Mt Bethel the following children were born -
Thomas, b. 1807
Elizabeth, b. 1809
William, b. 1813 - - This son is a "MAYBE". Reason- during all further
research things point to William as a possible son, and things verbally
mentioned among descendents of the John and Catherine mention, William a
son of John and Catherine Warner. Also his occupation as a "Miller"
along with other Warner's who were Miller's. William showed up in the
census list in 1834 in Forks Township, Northampton Co., PA

BUT - there are no records as to Birth or Baptism. There is a
record of his marriage to a Margaretha Arner in April 7, 1833 in Easton,
PA.

Knowing the facts of the research, this in no way dispute's it. This is
just a way to try and get "positive fact" as to his parents and siblings.

Thank's to anyone that might make a reply.

Larry W. warnerlarry@juno.com
==============================
New! Family Tree Maker 2005. Build your tree and search for your
ancestors at the same time. Share your tree with family and friends.
Learn more:
http://landing.ancestry.com/familytreemaker/2005/tour.aspx?sourceid=14599
&targetid=5429

New mailing list

2006-02-13T10:39:31-06:00

Hi all,

many of you utilize the county website and other resources at PA-Roots.
We've recently started a Newsletter, if you'd like to subscribe to it send
an e-mail to pa-rootsfriends-subscribe@yahoogroups.com or visit
http://www.pa-roots.com/friends/index.html and subscribe from the link
there. The Newsletter will be published about once a month, there is no
charge to be a subscriber. The Newsletter highlights some of the new
features or new data that is hosted at PA-Roots. You can read our first
issue by visiting http://www.pa-roots.com/friends/index.html

Nathan Zipfel
PA-Roots.com
http://www.pa-roots.com/

Re: [PA-BIO] Any folks interested in transcribing biographies

2006-02-02T07:57:24-06:00

Very nice project. Thanks to everyone involved in this.
Ray

----- Original Message -----
From: "Nathan Zipfel"
To:
Sent: Wednesday, February 01, 2006 10:41 PM
Subject: [PA-BIO] Any folks interested in transcribing biographies

> Hi all,
>
> Our list has been quiet for a long time. There is now 10,643 Biographies
> for Pennsylvania on-line at
> http://www.pa-roots.com/pabios/index.html I hope you'll stop by and check
> them out.
>
> Is anyone interested in helping to transcribe biographies from some of the
> published histories of the various counties in Pennsylvania? If you are
> interested in transcribing (scanning, OCR, Proofreading) please send an
> e-mail to:
>
> pabiographies@gmail.com (Please do not post your interest in
> transcribing to the list - only send it to this e-mail address).
>
> Please indicate what county or counties you might be interested in working
> on. I'll have to check to see if I have anything for your particular county
> to work on.
>
> Again, if you're interested, please send your e-mail to
> pabiographies@gmail.com
>
> Nathan
>
>
> ==== PA-BIO Mailing List ====
> Please remember this is a mailing list for the discussion of PA Biographies ONLY.
> No Queries please!
> PA Biographies Project
>
>
>

Any folks interested in transcribing biographies

2006-02-01T21:41:04-06:00

Hi all,

Our list has been quiet for a long time. There is now 10,643 Biographies
for Pennsylvania on-line at
http://www.pa-roots.com/pabios/index.html I hope you'll stop by and check
them out.

Is anyone interested in helping to transcribe biographies from some of the
published histories of the various counties in Pennsylvania? If you are
interested in transcribing (scanning, OCR, Proofreading) please send an
e-mail to:

pabiographies@gmail.com (Please do not post your interest in
transcribing to the list - only send it to this e-mail address).

Please indicate what county or counties you might be interested in working
on. I'll have to check to see if I have anything for your particular county
to work on.

Again, if you're interested, please send your e-mail to
pabiographies@gmail.com

Nathan

Re: [PA-BIO] Bio: Robert Roger Brown s/o William Murray Brown and Mary Elizabeth Brown

2005-06-22T15:08:45-06:00

I'm looking for a JOHN BYNG who is supposed to have lived in PA in 1773.
Can some one check him out for me?

thank you,

Caroline Byng

Bio: Robert Roger Brown s/o William Murray Brown and Mary Elizabeth Brown

DLHGLH@aol.com — 2005-06-20T22:48:04-06:00

Brown, R. R. (19 Oct. 1885-20 Feb. 1964), pastor and radio evangelist, was
born Robert Roger Brown in Dagus Falls, Pennsylvania, the son of Scottish
immigrants William Murray Brown, a miner, and Mary Elizabeth Rogers. One of
fourteen children, he was raised as a Presbyterian but had little interest in
religion until he was converted at the age of eighteen during a revival in a
Presbyterian church. At a subsequent meeting at a local nondenominational
church, Brown encountered a representative of A. B. Simpson's Christian and
Missionary Alliance (CMA), an association of ministers and churches founded in 1881
to promote greater missionary activity both in the United States and abroad.
Impressed by the movement's organization, dedication to missions, and
nonpartisan tone, he decided to train for the ministry in the CMA. In 1906 he
entered Alliance College at Nyack, New York, earning a B.A. in 1910. After serving
as an interim pastor for a Baptist church on Long Island, Brown was ordained
on 19 August 1911. He then accepted the pastorate of an Alliance church in
Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, and during his nine years there became friends with
leading CMA figures, such as Simpson, E. D. Whiteside, and Paul Rader. Soon
after his arrival at the church, Brown met and, in 1912, married a member of
his congregation, Mary Edith Swihart; the couple had three children. In 1920,
at the invitation of new Alliance president Paul Rader, Brown moved to
Chicago and became the district superintendent for seven midwestern states. After
establishing a new CMA congregation in Chicago, he went on the road,
conducting a series of revivals in his new territory. In July 1922 Brown went to
Omaha, where he erected a temporary tabernacle for what he thought would be a
short evangelistic campaign. The meetings were so successful, however, that he
decided to make the tabernacle a permanent congregation, the Gospel
Tabernacle, and relocated his base of operations to Omaha. In April 1923 Brown was
asked by officials at local radio station WOAW (later WOW) to conduct a service
for the station's first Sunday on the air. He was asked to return the
following week but agreed only at the urging of a local Congregational pastor, who
said he had been praying that God would "get an advantage" over the air. Though
hesitant in the beginning, Brown continued to broadcast his "World Radio
Chapel" program over WOAW/WOW for the next forty-one years, becoming a
fundamentalist broadcasting fixture in the Plains states with one of the
longest-running religious broadcasts of its time. Especially in the early years, Brown
had a tendency to attack the microphone--literally shouting out his
sermons--but he always acted as if he were addressing the individual. The effectiveness
of his style is evident in a letter sent by one repentant listener who wrote
that he was lying on his couch smoking a pipe when he heard Brown say, "You
mossback, ungrateful creature of God! If you would think of what God's done
for you, you'd take that pipe out of your mouth and get down on your knees and
give thanks to God," whereupon, convinced that Brown could see him, he
claimed to have jumped up. Brown's broadcast differed in three major ways from
those of most fundamentalist radio preachers of that period. First, aside from
an occasional foray into dispensational prophetic speculation, he rarely
strayed from an individualist, evangelistic appeal and thereby avoided the stigma
of intolerance that marked some fundamentalist preachers, such as the
controversial "Fighting Bob" Shuller of Los Angeles. Largely for this reason, his
radio ministry made Brown something of a civic institution; as a result, his
broadcasts, unlike most others of his ilk, received free air time, and thus he
did not need to solicit funds to sustain the ministry. The third
distinguishing feature was Brown's strategy of dubbing his program the "World Radio
Congregation" and issuing official certificates of membership to interested
listeners. At the peak of his popularity in the mid-1930s, Brown's World Radio
Congregation boasted as many as 200,000 "members" in the Plains and Midwest.
Despite the success of this concept, however, Brown did not see it as a new
ecclesiastical vision but rather as a publicity strategy, which he used only in
the 1920s and 1930s, dropping it once the novelty had outlived its usefulness.
Brown's broadcast ministry afforded him great visibility, and in his later
years he was a prominent figure at Alliance conventions, where he developed the
"Preacher's Chorus" and orchestrated the missionary rally that closed each
meeting. He was made a member of the CMA Board of Managers in 1925 and held
the position until 1960. In 1933 he founded the Bible and Missionary Conference
Center at Okoboji Lakes, Iowa, an important ecumenical gathering spot for
midwestern fundamentalists as well as an Alliance campground. He also made
several well-publicized world missionary tours, and his Omaha congregation was
directly responsible for raising more than $1 million for Alliance missions.
After several months of failing health, Brown died in Omaha. His congregation
continued the radio broadcast--renamed "The Radio Chapel Service"--over a
small network of about a dozen stations until 1977. He was elected to the
National Religious Broadcasters' Hall of Fame posthumously in 1976. R. R. Brown's
efforts in early fundamentalist radio, along with those of evangelists Aimee
Semple McPherson and Paul Rader, showed skeptical fundamentalists that radio
could be an effective tool for evangelization. Brown's World Radio Congregation
gained him his greatest notoriety, but his limited use of the strategy is
suggestive of the primary importance that fundamentalists placed on traditional
notions of local church polity and congregational life. Brown's broadcasts
and his Omaha congregation served primarily as rallying points for the CMA
and--more importantly--for fundamentalist activity in general in the Midwest and
Plains states after 1925, during the post-Scopes trial period of
retrenchment and institution-building that insured fundamentalism's post-World War II
reemergence.

Bibliography

There is no collection of R. R. Brown Papers; such materials as exist are
largely in the possession of family members and the Christ Community Church
(formerly the Omaha Gospel Tabernacle) in Omaha, Neb. A small amount of material
on Brown is in the archives of the Christian and Missionary Alliance at
Alliance headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colo. Brown's personal style lent
itself to the pulpit and the radio ministry, and as a result he did not leave a
prolific written legacy. Now-hard-to-find pamphlets from his radio sermons,
such as, "Did Jesus Know Our Times? Dictatorship" (1933), typify the sorts of
things he sent to his listeners. Brown did occasionally pen devotional
articles and sermons for Alliance organs; representative of them is "Intellectualism
vs. The Illuminated Mind," Alliance Weekly, 9 Oct. 1957, pp. 3-4. There has
been no attempt at a scholarly examination of Brown's life and career, but
his involvement with the CMA is covered succinctly in an obituary tribute by
William F. Smalley, "Dr. R. R. Brown: His Contribution to the Christian and
Missionary Alliance," Alliance Weekly, 1 Apr. 1964, pp. 6-7, 13. Brown also
receives some attention in Robert L. Niklaus, John S. Sawin, and Samuel J.
Stoesz's general history of the CMA, All for Jesus (1986). Brown's radio work is
examined somewhat by Dennis Voskuil in "The Power of the Air: Evangelicals and
the Rise of Religious Broadcasting," in American Evangelicals and the Mass
Media, ed. Quentin J. Schultze (1990), and by Mark Ward, Sr., in Air of
Salvation: The Story of Christian Broadcasting (1994).

Larry Eskridge

Citation:
Larry Eskridge. "Brown, R. R.";
_http://www.anb.org/articles/08/08-00193.html_ (http://www.anb.org/articles/08/08-00193.html) ; American National
Biography Online Feb. 2000. Access Date: Copyright (c) 2000 American Council of
Learned Societies. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
Privacy Policy.

Copyright Notice: Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim
copies of the American National Biography of the Day and Sample Biographies
provided that the following statement is preserved on all copies:

From American National Biography, published by Oxford University Press,
Inc., copyright 2000 American Council of Learned Societies. Further information
is available at http://www.anb.org.

American National Biography articles may not be published commercially (in
print or electronic form), edited, reproduced or otherwise altered without the
written permission of Oxford University Press which acts as an agent in
these matters for the copyright holder, the American Council of Learned
Societies. Contact: Permissions Department, Oxford University Press, 198 Madison
Avenue, New York, NY 10016; fax: 212-726-6444.

Bio: Leon Edel s/o Simon Edel and Fannie Malamud Edel

DLHGLH@aol.com — 2005-06-13T10:56:50-06:00

LEON EDEL

Edel, Leon (9 Sept. 1907-5 Sept. 1997), biographer, theorist of
biographical
literature, and literary historian, was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
to
Simon Edel and Fannie Malamud Edel. His family moved to Saskatchewan,
Canada
when he was about two years old and he remained in Canada for his college
education, receiving his B.A. in 1927 from McGill University in Montreal,
and
continued there for the start of his graduate studies, obtaining an M.A. in
1928 with honors, having written a thesis on the writer Henry James, the
first
step in his becoming the preeminent authority in the world on James's life
and work. Along with friends in the arts community of Montreal, Edel helped
to
found the McGill Fortnightly Review, a literary publication. As a reward for

the excellence of his thesis on James, he received a Province of Quebec
scholarship to study abroad. Electing to attend the University of Paris, he
was
awarded his Ph.D. (docteur es lettres) in 1931. Originally written in
French,
his dissertation on Henry James was "Les Annees Dramatiques" and it was
translated into English.
In 1932 Edel took a post at Sir George Williams University in Montreal,
where he was an assistant professor of English until 1934. He held a Gug
genheim
fellowship from 1936 to 1938. During the Great Depression and World War II,
he
also worked in broadcasting and journalism in Canada because at the time
positions at American universities were difficult to obtain, especially
with a
foreign degree. He then served in the U.S. Army, rising from sergeant to
first
lieutenant, and was awarded the Bronze Star, having been a specialist in
psychological warfare following D-Day. After the war, he worked as a
journalist,
first in Canada and then in New York. In 1950 he married Roberta Roberts,
from whom he was to be divorced in 1979; the marriage was childless. In
1953
Edel was named an associate professor of English at New York University and
became a full professor in 1955. During his tenure at NYU, where he
remained
until 1966, he was honored with the title Henry James Professor of English
and
American Letters. Edel retired to Hawaii and taught at the University of
Hawaii, where he was named the first Citizen's Professor of English in
1974. He
married Marjorie Putnam Sinclair in 1980. He died in Honolulu at age
eighty-nine.
Edel's enduring fascination with the life and work of Henry James took its
most notable form in the magisterial five-volume biography that he began
after
World War II. Henry James: The Untried Years, 1843-1870, appeared in 1953.
The subsequent volumes, all published by Lippincott, were subtitled The
Conquest of London, 1870-1883 (1962), The Middle Years, 1882-1895 (1962),
The
Treacherous Years, 1895-1901 (1969), and The Master, 1901-1916 (1972). He
was at
work on the second and third volumes in1959-1960 while a visiting professor
at
Harvard University, where he had the opportunity to examine James's private
papers, given to Harvard Library upon the writer's death in 1916. Those two
volumes were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1963; that same
year,
Edel was also the recipient of a National Book Award. In an assessment of
the full five-volume work, James Atlas wrote in the New York Times Book
Review
(6 Feb. 1972): "Edel manages to sustain interest in a figure who was
sedentary, verbose, self-concealing; he maintains a swift narrative pace
through
ingenious organization of his material . . . and . . . gives us a rich
tapestry
of James's life and times that reads like a novel." The vastness of this
landmark in literary biography reflected Edel's conviction that James was
the
"largest" literary figure to emerge from the United States during the
latter half
of the nineteenth century. The biographer saw in his subject the first
great
psychological realist in the history of the novel, a bridge between
Romanticism and
modernism, who surpassed in his range and fineness of insight the European
writers of stature whom he admired and befriended, including Gustave
Flaubert,
Emile Zola, George Eliot, and Ivan Turgenev. As an American who spent most
of his adult years in England and Europe, he developed in his numerous
novels
and stories "international" themes concerning the encounters of European
and
American characters and the conflicts between Old World and New World
sensibilities and attitudes. Edel saw in the sweep of James's oeuvre as a
whole--from such early masterpieces as Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a
Lady and his
subsequent novels on social themes, particularly The Bostonians and The
Princess Casamassima, to the major achievements of his later years,
including The
Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl--a capacious imagination akin to
Shakespeare's. The matching of biographer and subject seems especially apt
in Edel's case because he pioneered the psychological approach to the
reconstruction of a writer's life in the course of studying in minute detail
how
Henry James developed into a master of psychological nuance in fiction. As
early
as his doctoral studies in Paris, Edel had pursued an interest in psychology
and psychoanalysis by visiting in Vienna the psychiatrist Alfred Adler, a
former associate of Sigmund Freud. Edel himself underwent psycholoanalysis
following World War II and believed that the experience had heightened his
intellectual skills. As summarized by Arnold M. Ludwig, the Edelian
approach
emphasizes the kind of piecing together of disparate details that a
psychoanalyst
would bring to formulating the personality profile of an analysand: "The
task
of the biographer is to detect the patterns and modes of a person's works
and
productions, or, to use Edel's own analogy, the figure on the underside of
the carpet. Only by grasping the private mythology hidden behind the
person's
public mask can you depict the real person" (Ludwig, How Do We Know Who We
Are? [1997], p. 57). In Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (1984), Edel
proposed a set of premises that should be operative for the "new
biography,"
including the
need for biographers to "be familiar with the basics of psychoanalytical
psychology" and to "be imaginative in dealing with the form and structure
of
their works as novelists are, feeling free to use the same techniques that
give
narrative to fiction--flashbacks, retrospective chapters, summary chapters
.
. . [and] glimpses into the future." Edel was to condense his massive
original study of James into, first, a two-volume biography, The Life of
Henry James
(1977), and, then, an even more accessible single volume, Henry James, A
Life (1985). The latter was translated into several languages and won for
the
author international recognition. He was no less tireless as a compiler of
James's work, bringing out editions of the author's neglected plays, his
stories,
portions of his correspondence, and his significant critical writings,
including the prefaces to the novels. Edel's A Bibliography of Henry James,
prepared in association with Dan H. Laurence, appeared in 1957. But Edel by
no
means limited himself to Henry James. He also published studies of James
Joyce
(1947) and Willa Cather (1953; largely written by E. K. Brown and completed
by
Edel) and edited the diary of Alice James (1964) and the notebooks and
journals of Edmund Wilson, which appeared under the titles The Thirties
(1980), The
Forties (1983), and The Fifties (1986). (Lewis M. Dabney completed the
Wilson project by publishing The Sixties in 1993.) As a leader of the
psychological approach to literary and biographical analysis, he advanced
his ideas in
Literary Biography (1959), The Psychological Novel, 1900-1950 (1955), Stuff
of
Sleep and Dreams (1982), and contributed important articles to Biography as
an Art and Varieties of Literary Experience (both 1965). Numerous honors
were
bestowed on Edel. From 1957 to 1959 he was national president of the
American
chapter of P.E.N. and in 1972 was elected to the American Academy of Arts
and Letters, which awarded him its Gold Medal for biography in 1976. The
following
year, he was selected to be the Vernon Visiting Professor of Biography at
Dartmouth College, which served to acknowledge the influence Edel had come
to
exert on the genre of literary biography both in the United States and
abroad.
In 1977 he was also given the Hawaiian Writers' Award, and in 1981 he was
designated a "Living Treasure" by the Honpa Hongwanji Temple. Along with
Richard Ellmann's James Joyce (1959; rev. 1982), Leon Edel's Henry James
will
endure as one of the seminal literary biographies written in the
English-speaking
world during the twentieth century. Like Ellmann, he vivified his subject
and
made of him a central canonical figure in the evolution of modernism in
Western literature. His exhaustive research on James will remain a monument
unlikely to be superseded.

Bibliography

Edel, Writing Lives: Principia Biographical (1984) offers an excellent
description of his writing methods and philosophy. There is an excellent
review of
Edel's editing and comments on the Wilson journals in the New York Times
Book Review, 31 Aug.1986, by Joseph Epstein, the editor of the American
Scholar.
Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series, 22, pp. 110-17 has an excellent
updated biographical sketch of Edel and integrates literary analysis with
his
life story. Lyall H. Powers, Leon Edel and Literary Art (1988), describes
the
techniques and literary conventions that Edel used in researching and
writing biographies. Gloria G. Fromm, Essaying Biography: A Celebration for
Leon
Edel (1986), is a laudatory collection illuminating his works and
contributions
to the field of biography. John Batchelor, ed., The Art of Literary
Biography (1995), includes critiques of Edel's methodology, reflecting the
increasing
skepticism among some scholars about the efficacy of psychoanalysis in
understanding personality and the processes by which an author creates
fiction.
See also Book World, 6 Feb. 1972; Globe and Mail (Toronto), 3 May 1986; New
York Times Book Review, 19 June 1955, 4 Nov.1962, 6 Feb. 1972, 13 May 1979,
1
July 1979, 31 Aug. 1980, 14 Dec. 1980, 25 July 1982, 19 May 1982, 15 Apr.
1984, 28 Oct. 1984, 26 Jan. 1985, and 24 Nov. 1985.

Barbara Bennett Peterson

Citation: Barbara Bennett Peterson. "Edel, Leon";
_http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-03387.html_
(http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-03387.html) ; American
National Biography Online June 2000 Update.
Access Date: Copyright (c) 2000 American Council of Learned Societies.
Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Privacy
Policy.

Copyright Notice: Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim
copies of the American National Biography of the Day and Sample Biographies
provided that the following statement is preserved on all copies: From
American
National Biography, published by Oxford University Press, Inc., copyright
2000
American Council of Learned Societies. Further information is available at
http://www.anb.org.

American National Biography articles may not be published commercially (in
print or electronic form), edited, reproduced or otherwise altered without
the
written permission of Oxford University Press which acts as an agent in
these matters for the copyright holder, the American Council of Learned
Societies. Contact: Permissions Department, Oxford University Press, 198
Madison
Avenue, New York, NY 10016; fax: 212-726-6444.

Bio: Edwin Stanton Porter s/o Thomas Richard Porter and Mary Jane Clark

DLHGLH@aol.com — 2005-06-08T22:36:57-06:00

EDWIN STANTON PORTER

Porter, Edwin Stanton (21 Apr. 1870-30 Apr. 1941), pioneer
director-producer-inventor of cinema, was born in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, the son of
Thomas Richard Porter, a merchant, and Mary Jane Clark. Porter received his
education in the public schools of Connellsville. He worked at various jobs,
including plumber, exhibition skater, sign painter, tailor, and telegrapher. In
1893 Porter enlisted in the U.S. Navy, where he found his calling in working
with electrical machines. In conjunction with Allen Fiske he perfected a range
finder for the navy. Porter married Caroline Ridinger in 1893. When Porter's
enlistment in the navy ended in 1896, he found employment with Thomas A.
Edison, a pioneer of motion picture filming and exhibition. Porter first worked
in New York for Raff & Gammon, agents for Edison, exhibiting Edison's
Vitascope, and later he worked for Edison at the laboratory in West Orange, New
Jersey. Then he toured with Kuhn & Webster's Projectorscope, one of Edison's
competitors, traveling from Canada to Central America, where he learned what
pleased audiences on the screen. In 1899 Porter became part of Edison's
operations in New York in charge of motion picture production. For the next ten years
Porter participated in, and in many ways fashioned, the development of
feature motion pictures that told a story. Previously, films mostly were one- or
two-reel exhibitions of single incidents, news, or comedies. Porter wanted to
use the medium to tell a story that an audience could follow visually. One
such film, The Life of an American Fireman (1903), proved successful; he edited
this film for dramatic effect, used dissolves, and also introduced the
close-up shot. He also produced Teddy, the Grizzly King (1901), about
President-elect Theodore Roosevelt, and Jack and the Beanstalk (1902). Porter's place in
the history of film, however, is owed to his production, in 1903, of The Great
Train Robbery. The Great Train Robbery featured classic western action and
capitalized on the public's awareness of its theme, the last train robbery of
the Hole in the Wall Gang, through dime novels and the news. Although far
from the first western film, Porter's work did establish the genre and
identified an audience for such films. The picture toured for several years and
whetted the public's appetite for more westerns. As antiquated as The Great Train
Robbery may seem to current-day viewers, its narrative structure, its texture
in actors and settings, and its innovative combination of relatively new
techniques gave the film a dramatic coherence that was excitingly bold to
moviegoers of its time. Porter as writer and director approached the material with
fresh eyes. Although he employed some forty actors, twenty separate shots, and
ten different indoor and outdoor locations, he told a cohesive story of an
unprecedented twelve minutes in length that flowed from its intercutting
between camera angles and scenes, its lapses in time and changes in location, and
its comprehensive panning shot that gave viewers a clear sense of the
developing action. The film established the classic three-part western form that has
continued to this day: crime, chase, and showdown. Porter introduced one
other filmmaking principle as well, the elimination of the nonessential by
editing. Made for about $150, The Great Train Robbery was an enormous success, the
most popular film in the United States up to 1912. And without fully
realizing his achievement, Porter created a touchstone film masterpiece.
Unfortunately, Porter did not retain a leadership role in films after his initial
success, and he produced no other work, either for Edison or later on his own, to
compare with The Great Train Robbery. The Kleptomaniac (1905) was heavy with
social overtones, and other films also failed to capture public interest.
After 1909 Porter worked with several production companies, again without
distinction. First he joined with others to form a production company named Rex,
then in 1911 became chief director for Famous Players Film Company, operated by
Adolph Zukor; he also shared an interest in the company's ownership. Porter
directed The Prisoner of Zenda (1913) with James K. Hackett in the first
five-reel film produced in the United States and in other films directed such
stars as Mary Pickford and John Barrymore. Pickford
said of her experience with Porter that he always seemed more interested in
what was going on inside the camera than what it filmed. Porter's interest in
the technical aspects of cinematography did exceed his concern with business
aspects or the glamour of the new industry. Perhaps for this reason he left
Famous Players in 1916 for the presidency of the Precision Machine Company,
the manufacturer of the Simplex projector, which he had invented, and
continued in this position until his retirement in 1925. Porter died at the Taft
Hotel in New York City.

Bibliography

Among the best books on western film is Jon Tuska, The Filming of the West
(1976), which discusses Porter on pp. 3-9. See also George F. Everson and
William K. Everson, The Western: From Silents to the Seventies (1973), especially
chapter 3, "The Primitives: Edwin S. Porter and Broncho Billy Anderson." See
also Jack Nachbar, Focus on the Western (1974).

Archie P. McDonald

Citation:
Archie P. McDonald. "Porter, Edwin Stanton";
_http://www.anb.org/articles/18/18-00947.html_ (http://www.anb.org/articles/18/18-00947.html) ; American
National Biography Online Feb. 2000. Access Date:
Copyright (c) 2000 American Council of Learned Societies. Published by
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Bio: William Alfred Fowler s/o John McLeod Fowler and Jennie Summers Watson

DLHGLH@aol.com — 2005-05-27T18:41:54-06:00

WILLIAM ALFRED FOWLER

Fowler, William Alfred (9 Aug. 1911-14 Mar. 1995), physicist, was born in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of John McLeod Fowler, an accountant, and
Jennie Summers Watson. When Fowler was two, his family moved to Lima, Ohio,
where he attended the public schools and graduated in 1929 at the top of his
class from Lima Central High School. He then entered Ohio State University from
which he received his bachelor's degree in engineering physics in 1933. That
same year he began his graduate studies in physics at the California Institute
of Technology, where he became a research assistant of Charles C. Lauritsen
(1892-1968), who was the head of Caltech's High Voltage and Kellogg Radiation
Laboratories. Fowler was awarded his Ph.D. in 1936; his dissertation,
"Radioactive Elements of Low Atomic Number," was written under Lauritsen's
direction. For the rest of his life Fowler's career was to be inextricably
identified with that of Lauritsen (until his retirement in 1962), and together they
were to propel Caltech into an international center of excellence in nuclear
physics. Indeed, like his mentor, Fowler spent his entire life at Caltech: as a
research fellow (1936-1939); assistant professor (1939-1942); associate
professor (1942-1946); professor (1946-1970), and finally as the first Institute
Professor of Physics (1970-1982). During the war years, together with much of
the Kellogg lab staff, he followed Lauritsen to Washington, D.C.
(1940-1941), where at the National Bureau of Standards and the Carnegie Institution for
Terrestrial Magnetism they made noteworthy contributions to the development
of proximity fuses for bombs, shells, and ordnance rockets. When the National
Defense Research Committee authorized the setup of Caltech's rocket project
in 1941, Fowler returned to Pasadena as assistant director of the project
(1941-1944). When this was subsequently taken over by the U.S. Navy, he was
involved in the establishment of the Naval Ordnance Test Station at Inyokern
(now China Lake). In 1944 he served for three months in the South Pacific as
a technical observer, and with other Caltech scientists worked at Los Alamos
in fabricating components of the atomic bomb. Concurrent with his Caltech
duties, Fowler was a Fulbright Lecturer and Guggenheim Fellow at the University
of Cambridge (1954-1955, 1961-1962), and a visiting professor at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1966. Fowler's many honors included sharing
the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, for his
theoretical and experimental studies of nuclear reactions, which were important
in forming the chemical elements in the universe. His other awards include
the Naval Ordnance Development Award (1945); the Presidential Medal of Merit
(1948); the Lamme Medal (1952); the Liege Medal (1955); the Barnard Medal
(1965); the Apollo Achievement Award (1969); the Tom Bonnor Prize (1970); the G.
Unger Vetlesen Prize (1973); the National Medal of Science, presented by
President Ford (1974); the Eddington Medal (1978); the Bruce Gold Medal
(1979); the Sullivant Medal (1985); and the French Legion d'Honneur,
presented by President Mitterand (1989). Fowler was also elected a member of the
National Academy of Sciences in 1956, was president of the American Physical
Society (1976), and was a member of numerous governmental advisory boards and
committees. Fowler's main research was a bold attempt to determine and
understand the nuclear reactions occurring in the birth, evolution, and
death of stars and other objects in the universe. Although much of this work
was a team effort, he was the acknowledged leader of a new area of physics,
nuclear astrophysics, which included theories of nuclear synthesis and
nuclear cosmochronology. These studies had their modern origin in 1937-1939 with
the independent proposals of Hans Bethe in the United States and Carl Friedrich
von Weizsacker in Germany of a mechanism for supplying the energy
required to keep stars shining for billions of years. This was known as the
C-N cycle of reactions, and it employed carbon and nitrogen as catalysts to
transmute four protons into a helium nucleus, plus two positrons and two
neutrinos. Somewhat later Bethe and Charles Critchfield suggested a proton-proton
chain of reactions that would yield the same result starting from hydrogen
alone. The first nuclear reaction in the C-N cycle was investigated at Caltech
in 1933 and led to an intensive study of nuclear reactions involving light
nuclei since they offered the possibility of a quantitative test of the
proposed energy production processes. This work was interrupted by the onset of the
war, but after the war Fowler and his associates renewed their work and
showed that stars having masses up to about 1.2 solar masses derive their main
energy from the proton-proton chain rather than the C-N cycle. Further
experiments considered reactions that build carbon and oxygen from helium nuclei
produced in stellar cores. Early in 1953 Fred Hoyle, who was visiting Caltech,
suggested that this mechanism would not be adequate to supply the observed
abundance of carbon unless there was an excited state of carbon-12 that would
serve as a resonance. Within days Fowler and members of his group, led by Ward
Whaling, experimentally found this state and in doing so established the
general feasibility of building elements in stars. Subsequently, during his first
visit to Cambridge, Fowler began his historic active collaboration with Hoyle
and Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge. This work culminated in their seminal
paper, "Synthesis of Elements in Stars," Reviews of Modern Physics 29 (Oct.
1957): 547-650, which outlined a series of processes taking place in successive
generations of stars that produce the observed abundances of
elements and nuclides in the universe. This paper was to be a key
contribution leading to his Nobel prize. Later developments by Hoyle and Fowler in 1960
included the now standard mechanisms for type I and type II supernovae, and
this was reprinted in their book, Nucleosynthesis in Massive Stars and
Supernovae (1965). In the same year they extended the previous work with the
Burbidges to date the synthesis of elements from their abundances in the
isotopes of the radioactive nuclei of uranium, thorium, and their other
transuranic ancestors (see Annals of Physics 10 [June 1960]: 280-302). Fowler
coined the term nuclear cosmochronology for this theory. Finally, in joint work
with Hoyle and Robert V. Wagoner (Astrophysical Journal 148 [Apr. 1967]:
3-49), Fowler studied the dynamics of the expansion of the universe--the
so-called Big Bang--and its implications for nucleosynthesis. This latter work
continued until 1988, with a variety of coauthors, and has led to a comprehensive
basis for modern research in the nuclear physics of stellar evolution and
nucleosynthesis. Fowler's book Nuclear Astrophysics (1967), which was based on
the text of his 1965 Jayne Lectures for the American Philosophical Society,
gives a lucid overview of his research, which anticipates some of his subsequent
work on supermassive stars, quasars, extragalactic radio sources, and
galactic explosions. Fowler was not only a distinguished scientist whose work has
significantly contributed to our understanding of the nuclear
processes governing the structure of the universe, but he was a rare
individual who inspired others with his infectious optimism and seemingly boundless
energy. He was devoted to Caltech and took great pride in his students and
coworkers, whose work he freely praised. Upon being notified of his Nobel
Prize, he commented that he considered it to be an award to the Kellogg Radiation
Lab, and not just to him. He was known worldwide as simply "Willy" and had an
unforgettable zest for life that never failed to brighten the world around
him. Two awards that pleased him most were those bestowed by his Caltech
colleagues and students: a "National Meddler" medal in 1974 and in 1983 a t-shirt
bearing the inscription "Nuclear Alchemist 1." In August 1940 he married
Ardianne Foy Omsted; they had two daughters. After her death in May 1988, he
married Mary Dutcher in December 1989. He died in Pasadena.

Bibliography

Fowler's papers are held by the Institute Archives at Caltech and include an
oral biography. A brief autobiographical note and portrait is in "From Steam
to Stars to the Early Universe," Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics
30 (1992): 1-9. In December 1995 a three-day symposium on nuclear
astrophysics was held at Caltech in his memory, and excerpts of tributes presented
there are in "A Celebration of Willy Fowler," Engineering and Science 49, no. 2
(1995): 34-43. Of special interest is his seventieth birthday volume, Essays
in Nuclear Astrophysics presented to William A. Fowler (1982), ed. Charles A.
Barnes et al. This contains a list of Fowler's publications through 1981 and
a delightful paper, "Two Decades of Collaboration with Willy Fowler" (pp.
1-9) by Fred Hoyle. Fowler's early account, "The Origin of the Elements,"
Scientific American 195 (Sept. 1956): 82-91, contains a survey suitable for the
general reader. Obituaries are in Physics Today 47 (Sept. 1995): 116-118;
Nature 374 (30 Mar. 1995): 406; and the New York Times, 16 Mar. 1995.

Joseph D. Zund

Online Resources

The Nobel Prize in Physics 1983 _http://www.nobel.se/physics/laureates/1983/_
(http://www.nobel.se/physics/laureates/1983/) From the Nobel e-Museum, the
Official Web Site of The Nobel Foundation.

Citation: Joseph D. Zund. "Fowler, William Alfred";
_http://www.anb.org/articles/13/13-02586.html_ (http://www.anb.org/articles/13/13-02586.html) ;
American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
Access Date: Copyright (c) 2000 American Council of Learned Societies.
Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy.

Copyright Notice: Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copi
es of the American National Biography of the Day and Sample Biographies
provided that the following statement is preserved on all copies:

From American National Biography, published by Oxford University Press,
Inc., copyright 2000 American Council of Learned Societies. Further information
is available at http://www.anb.org.

American National Biography articles may not be published commercially (in
print or electronic form), edited, reproduced or otherwise altered without the
written permission of Oxford University Press which acts as an agent in
these matters for the copyright holder, the American Council of Learned
Societies. Contact: Permissions Department, Oxford University Press, 198 Madison
Avenue, New York, NY 10016; fax: 212-726-6444.