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The material below is exerpted from C. H. Cramer, Case Institute of Technology, A Centennial History, 1880-1980, © 1980, Case Western Reserve University.
The career of Levi Kerr was unusual and wide-ranging in geographical location and in occupational interests. A cousin of Leonard Case, Jr., he was born near Cleveland in Mentor and at the age of sixteen went to the West Indies and Japan, where he spent the rest of his teens. On his return to the United States he tried the dry-goods business in New York City. Anticipating greater returns he went to Western Pennsylvania, where he found them. There he bought a large tract of farm land; it was an unusual and beneficial purchase because oil was discovered on it, and Kerr sold advantageously to the Standard Oil Company. With ample capital he returned to the Western Reserve, where he engaged in banking and business operations. When Leonard Case, Jr. died, Kerr became the administrator of his estate. He made it a practice, unusual at the time, to go to Florida for the winter months; there his death was a tragic one. Living on a comfortable houseboat, he rose during the night and slipped or fell off the vessel; by the time his body was recovered he was dead from drowning. In his memory, his sister Laura Kerr Axtell donated $100,000 to establish the Kerr professorship in Mathematics--a cherished one which was the first endowed chair at Case (original documents).
Levi Kerr Chair holders:
After the approval of [Benjamin] Gould's recommendations the board appointed Stockwell as instructor of mathematics and astronomy, and asked him to proceed with the organization of the faculty and the formulation of the courses of instruction; in effect, in the absence of a president, who was not to arrive until 1886, Stockwell was the unofficial but effective director of the institution for its first five years. He set up a four-year course. The first two years would be devoted to thorough training in mathematics, chemistry, physics, civil engineeering and drawing, and modern languages (French and German). In the junior and senior years students would choose a course of study in one of the sciences or in civil engineering; in the final year a thesis would embody the results of their study and investigation. Applicants for admission had to be at least sixteen years of age and were required to pass an examination in arithmetic (including the metric system of weights and measures), algebra, geometry, chemistry, physics, and English...
Stockwell was sui generis. He was born in Massachusetts; his parent moved to Ohio, and young Stockwell grew up on a farm near Cleveland. He had little formal education, most of it in the three winter months when there was little to do on the farm. Until he was twelve he had shown little interest in anything; at that point he developed a fascination for history and mathematics. It was the outbreak of the Mexican War and the dispute with Great Britain over Oregon that excited him about history. It was a dramatic event in the heavens that brought a lifelong interest in astronomy. There was an almanac in the kitchen of his farm house which predicted a total eclipse of the moon on 24 November 1844. It happened, and the lad was so impressed by this awesome event that he resolved to learn how such phenomena could be predicted. He had never heard of astronomy, and the curriculum for the public schools hardly included it; on his own he collected all the almanacs he could find, solved arithemetical problems published in a weekly paper form Philadelphia which he borrowed from a neighbor, and mastered an old textbook on arithmetic that happened to come into his possession. In 1846 he learned of the discovery of the planet Neptune; this inspired him to master algebra, geometry, and trigonometry as well.
In the course of his reading, and through attendance at lectures at Western Reserve College at nearby Hudson, he found constant reference to Mécanique céleste by Pierre Simon La Place. The most prestigious book store in Cleveland in the last half of the nineteenth century was J. B. Cobb and Company. Junius Brutus Cobb, who owned it, was a knowledgeable bibliophile and was surprised one day when a twenty-year-old young man with a bucolic air inquired if the store had a copy of La Place's magnum opus. It was the first time Cobb had ever had a request for the volume, which he knew only as a citation in scientific catalogues. He replied that he not only did not have the book but doubted whether it could be found outside of college libraries and observatories. The youth asked Cobb to order it. When the work finally arrived, it was Stockwell's turn to be surprised and challenged. Instead of a single book of modest size, he had bought four large quarto volumes containing a total of almost four thousand pages "of the most difficult mathematical work that can be imagined." Its cost was not the expected five, but forty dollars; Stockwell noted that "I felt for once that I had an elephant on my hands, aside form half a summer's work to get the money to pay for it." But he plunged straight ahead; in order to comprehend his expensive purchase he taught himself French and calculus--the latter confronted on almost every page. He recalled:
I had a feeling of friendship for the work, notwithstanding its formidable dimensions and the austerity of its interior. It was, however, a number of years before I ceased to be awe-struck in its presence, feeling that no one but its author could properly interrogate its pages or fully comprehend its mysteries.
When Stockwell also ordered European books on the theories of probabilities, Cobb was startled enough to mention the precocious farmhand to his friend Leonard Case, Jr., who was so impressed he rode fifteen miles into the country to meet the lad. A warm friendship resulted that continued throughout Case's life; he became Stockwell's patron, financing his publications and providing "material encouragement" that made possible full-time devotion to scientific pursuits. It was also Case who encouraged Stockwell to concentrate on the theory of the moon's motion and the computation of ellipses, the fields in which his major contributions were made. Case would never know that his long ride by horseback into the country, based largely on impulse, would be responsible -- after his own death -- for Stockwell's major role in the early development of Case School of Applied Science. When James D. Cleveland, as chairman of the board of trustees at Case, delivered the address at commencement in 1898, he observed that just as the greatest discovery of Sir Humphrey Davy was the discovery of Faraday -- so the greatest by Leonard Case, Jr., was that of John Nelson Stockwell.
By 1852, when he was twenty, Stockwell recalled that he "had resolved to make myself famous by a publication"; it was his first work, The Western Reserve Almanac for the Year of our Lord 1853. There was a flaw in the printing; he observed, with wit and good humor, that "by a singular fatality my name was accidently omitted from the title page and the authors incognito was never exposed." Before long, however, he began to establish a name for himself. By 1860 he had mastered the methods of computation of the orbits of planets and comets; he began to publish in the Astronomical Journal (the first in the nation devoted to research in that field), and worked at various times for the Longitude Department of the United Stated Coast Survey, where his friend Benjamin Gould made a job available, and for the United States Naval Observatory. In 1873 there appeared his Memoir on the Secular Variations of the Elements of the Orbits of the Eight Principal Planets; published by the Smithsonian Institution, it is widely regarded as his outstanding work. In his last years he proposed a theory of the tides which took issue with accepted thinking on the subject. Modest, genial, gentle -- this life was one of extreme simplicity; when he died at eighty-eight in 1920 he would be called the "Dean of American Astronomy," and the head of the United States Observational Station in California would say that he was one of the worthiest successors to Pierre La Place.
In its formative years Case had -- in Stockwell -- a chairman of the faculty who was not an experienced educator, not an administrator, and not devoted to teaching. He was a scholar enraptured only by scientific research and individual inquiry. Teaching was a distraction; although in 1886 Case made him the first Kerr Professor of Mathematics and Western Reserve gave him an honorary doctorate, the next year he resigned to devote the rest of his life to research. But for half a dozen years the institution had the advantage of his presence -- and what a presence it was.
[Charles Sumner Howe] was reared in the East on a farm near Boston; to achieve his public-school education in an era that knew no buses, he walked each day to a school that was two miles distant. His father game him the use of a patch of the farm's land, saying he could raise whatever he wished and keep the profits, in any. At first the enterprise was unsuccessful, but in the second year the youngster made enought to buy a watch; later he would become an authority on much more complex timepieces.
His baccalaureate, which was the B.S. in Agriculture, was earned at Boston University; after receiving the diploma he went West... His motivations for the journey were derived from an unsophisticated sentimentality about life on exotic ranches, and from a desire to teach; for these reasons he took a position in a preparatory academy in Albuquerque...
Actually Howe came out of the experience with a skill he had not anticipated. On reporting to the trustees of the academy he was surprised to find that they were more interested in assaying than in operating an educational institution; their first question to the new teacher was whether he had brought an assaying outfit. Howe had not and knew nothing about the process; the trustees made it clear that he was expected to acquire both the equipment and the skill as quickly as possible. During the first Christmas vacation Howe went to Santa Fe, where he studied assaying under the principal of an academy who was a graduate of the Columbia School of Mines; he then purchased an assay outfit and returned to Albuquerque. From that point he taught school from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon; then went to the assay business which he had established and worked until midnight. There were plenty of customers who wanted to know the gold and silver content of their ores, and Howe was the only person in Albuquerque competent to tell them.
After two years in New Mexico he returned to the East for graduate work in mathematics and physics at Johns Hopkins. His chief interest was in astronomy; for that reason in 1883 he accepted a position as professor of mathematics and astronomy at Buchtel College in Akron, Ohio. There he raised enought money to build a small observatory; he secured a small telescope and two astronomical clocks for the college, and taught the first course in astronomy at the institution. He also wrote a dissertation that won him a not-too-difficult doctorate from the College of Wooster nearby; the title of the treatise was "The Determination of the Latitude of the Buchtel College Observatory." In 1889 Case was looking for a successor to John Nelson Stockwell, and Howe approached [President] Staley for the position; he soon heard that the job had been offered to another candidate. A week later he received a wire from Staley; it stated that if Howe still wanted the position he should come to Cleveland. Howe did, and had a most unusual meeting with the president. Staley began by expressing his great disappointment that the leading candidate had refused the position; he then asked Howe to take it at a salary that was $500 more than had been offered to Staley's first choice. It sometimes pays to wait; Howe accepted the offer and began a career at Case that lasted forty years.
As professor of mathematics and astronomy Howe repeated his career at Buchtel; he constructed the first observatory on campus and until he became president in 1902 carried a double load of teaching and research. He taught during the day and on five nights of the week was in the observatory until midnight; slept in the forenoon, and went home for breakfast at noon. He prided himself on sophisticated and accurate instruments. He build an "almucantar," a device designed to replace the astronomical transit which determines the time of passage of a star over the meridian. The unique feature of this instrument was that the telescope was attached to a circular ring floating in mercury, keeping it level at all times. It had been invented by a professor at Harvard, but Howe's version of it was much more imposing; the "almucantar" at Harvard Observatory weighed 35 pounds--Howe's, 2,300 pounds.
Accuracy is needed in an astronomical clock; in order to achieve it Howe was the first to bring to this country from Germany a Riefler clock, which he developed into the most perfect timekeeper the world had ever known. Because the accuracy of an astronomical clock depends largely upon the maintenance of the pendulum at exactly the same length, it was desirable to have the instrument under constant temperature and atmospheric pressure. Riefler had succeeded in making a clock where the pressure could be controlled; it was placed in a room artificially heated and controlled by thermostats. Howe's Riefler was mounted in a room with brick walls; the clock could be observed only through three glass windows set in a row. In time he could boast that his clock, which varied from the absolute by only a fraction of a second a month, was the most accurate in the world; next was the clock at the Greenwich Observatory in England, in third place the instrument in the United States Naval Observatory in Washington. Howe was justifiably proud of this accomplishment and would observe that it was only after he "had proved to the Naval Observatory authorities that the deviation from the mean rate of their old clock was six times as large as mine that they purchased a Riefler."...
In appearance and personality Howe was austere and cold; he had none of [Cady] Staley's warmth. Physically he was tall and thin and hirsute, with both mustache and a van Dyke. His posture was severely erect, like a straight oak on the hill of the New England in which he was reared; in demeanor he was sternly courteous. He did not achieve close personal touch with students as either professor or president; he knew only a few of them by name and was not in the habit of attending athletic contests or rallies. To most of his academic colleagues he seemed aloof. Attendance at faculty meetings was compulsory, although there was little participation by those who had to attend; Howe believed firmly that members of the teaching staff should be seen but not heard. He was a staunch advocate of hierarchical punctilio, a "pecking order' for personnel. Once he went on vacation to Florida and sent back a large box of cigars -- with instructions to the dean regarding professors two, assistant professors one, instructors none. For many years staff members designated themselves wryly, as one-, two-, or three-cigar professors. The Fortnightly Club, an organization of faculty wives, got the point. Before long it had an unwritten and unbroken rule: wives of professors could wear their hats at meetings of the club; the consorts of those in the lower ranks were bareheaded.
Few found it possible to commend Howe's cold personality, but there was universal respect for his scholarship and his dedication to educational objectives. Because of these talents he enjoyed a positive record of achievement in both the university and the surrounding community: he increased the prestige of the institution through his insistence on high academic standards, presided over the construction of significant new buildings on the campus, and played an active role in community affairs.
Theodore Moses Focke served Case for more than fifty years as a member of the faculty and dean.
His great-grandparents were born in Germany and came to America during the colonial period as part of the great influx of Teutonic immigrants. Theodore was born in Massillon, Ohio, in 1871--when Cleveland was a distant city. His birthplace was on the Ohio Canal, whose horsedrawn boats provided the chief connection with the growing city on the south shore of Lake Erie. He graduated from Case in civil engineering in 1892 and was immediately appointed instructor in mathematics at an annual salary of $600, paid quarterly; after a year in this position he spent three more at Oberlin as a tutor in physics and chemistry. He next went to the University of Göttingen, then a world center of learning in mathematics and physics, and received his doctorate in 1898 on submission of his dissertation titled "The Thermal Conductivity of Various Kinds of Glass." With two friends he also engaged in a strenuous extracurricular activity; they traveled by bicycle 2,000 miles from Germany to the Mediterranean coast, coming back by way of the Alps. Returning to Case as a member of the mathematics department he went up the academic ladder, becoming Kerr Professor and head of the department from 1908 until his retirement in 1943; in 1918 he became the first dean of the institution, serving in this capacity for a quarter of a century. It was a trying moment to begin his work as dean; a world war going on, and the Student Army Training Corps had taken over the campus; its officers knew little about an academic program but believed in stern discipline. After minor infractions of the rules the commanding officer would send his men to bed, awaken the detachment at 2 a.m., and march it down Liberty Boulevard to Lake Erie and back again. Focke was outraged, and powerless to do anything about it.
He did not publish extensively in scholarly journals; his forte was virtuosity as teacher and counselor. In this capacity his extraordinary talent was sorely needed initially because President Howe manifested little interest in students and was ill at ease with them. "Teddy" Focke maintained an open door for students seeking aid and advice; he enjoyed especially the counseling of the more fractious students who came to see him. Almost all found in him human understanding, although they did not always agree with what he said and did. He had an unusual knack of handling students, inspiring respect and affection. His memory was exceptional but highly selective. He seldom forgot a student's name or failed to compliment an outstanding work, but he could not recall a faulty performance; in his credo merit was forever praised, failure was never censured....
[President William E.] Wickenden once said that out of a total of 4,500 Case graduates during Focke's long tenure not more than a hundred or two missed his influence as counselor or teacher. As dean he had a great interest in intelligence tests and shared Howe's belief in the quality, rather than quantity of students; the result was that most graduates turned out to be successful and were appreciative for what he had done for them. His popularity was demonstrated by the thunderous ovations he received at alumni meetings. In 1935 he was honored with the First Alumni Award for Meritorious Service. In 1942 alumni gave $10,000 to the college for the establishment of the Focke Scholarship Trust Fund.
He reached seventy in 1941 but served as dean and departmental head for two more years because of the severe shortage of faculty during World War II. When he began his education at Case at seventeen in 1888, the freshman class had but 35 students; when he was seventy, the total number of students, in all categories, was 1,000 by day and 800 by night. After retirement in 1943 he continued as a part-time teacher; he noted wryly that students seemed to be dismayed that, although he was nearing eighty, he did not use a cane. He avocational interest in music continued; he was a strong supporter of the Case Glee Club, played violin in a faculty string quartet, and was a dedicated patron of the the Cleveland Orchestra. He died in 1949 at the age of seventy-eight.