Joseph Henry

By the time of his death in 1878, Joseph Henry was America's most eminent physical scientist. His achievements in the study of electricity, magnetism, and telegraphy during an era of national scientific aspiration had led to a thirty-year tenure as the first secretary of the Smithsonian, assuring his place in history as a key builder of an institutional framework for scientific inquiry. In this first biography of Henry since 1950, Albert E. Moyer reconstructs the crucial early phases of Henry's career, tracing how a boy of modest means in a nation of scant scientific resources attained…