Saturday, July 31

Professor Morton Masius

It was only a few years ago that when I was reading about Max Planck and his stating that "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it" (Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers) that I realized Professor Masius had translated Planck's Theory of heat radiation. I knew he had worked on a couple of physics texts, but I don't remember him ever mentioning Max Planck. I have only just discovered that in addition, he also translated Louis Rougier's La matérialisation de l'énergie as Philosophy and the new physics; an essay on the relativity theory and the theory of quanta. Here's a review from The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 28, No. 11/12. (Nov. - Dec., 1921), p. 455:

The only philosophers I ever recall him mentioning were John Stuart Mill, and possibly, Bertrand Russell. In any case, he would have been uncomfortable with Rougier's involvement with the Vichy government and later the French right wing. As I recall, the Professor was a yellow dog Democrat and a typical liberal in the American sense. I don't think he'd have much liked Rougier's "neo-liberalism."

I found out a little about Rougier's later career from Investigating Rougier (pdf), by Mathieu Marion. It was interesting to learn that the journalist Walter Lippmann was an exponent of traditional economic liberalism, like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek, with whom Rougier associated, and that he was also influenced by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl's idea of mentalité. (In fact, mentalité also helps explain Planck's problem in getting his ideas accepted.) Marion tries to put Rougier's contribution into perspective, and argues that a lot of the hostility against him is due to the fact that he was a logical empiricist and a neo-liberal, and French philosophers are hostile to empiricism, logic and liberalism.

Update
The Rougier translation is found in over 100 libraries worldwide, whereas the
Planck translation is found in over 600, and was republished in 1988. A search for Morton Masius at Amazon.com turns up History of Science in the United States: An Encyclopedia by Marc Rothenberg, which has this excerpt:
The [translation] into English of the second edition of Planck's [Wärmestrahlung] by the American Morton Masius in 1914 encouraged the introduction of quantum theory into the curriculum of universities in the United States.


Upupdatedate

Here's something one of the Professor's granddaughters wrote about Edith Bailey Masius:
Her son Morton was my grandfather. She was married to Alfred (or Albert, or Edmund, unclear! ) Masius near Wellsboro some time @ 1880, against the wishes of her family. They had two sons, Roderick and Morton, both born in Egg Harbor City, N.J. When the boys were young, Edith and Alfred (?) divorced (shocking for the time) and Edith moved to Leipzig Germany to study the new field of experimental psychology with Willem Wundt (at the time she was his only American woman student.) The boys went to the school attached the famous church where J.S. Bach was organist and choir director. Edith remarried, to Bernard Liebisch, who was a widower. They had a daughter Mildred (called in the family 'little Mildred', to distinguish her from Big Mildred, Denver Mildred etc.). Edith never returned to the U.S. Edith became ill and on her deathbed extracted a promise from her younger sister Mildred to care for her boys. Mildred Bailey gave up her own engagement (to a man in the Wellsboro area) to remain in Germany caring for the boys. She married her sister's husband Bernard Liebisch. They had a son, Arnold Llewellyn.

Roderick married a woman called Lillian, they are in the 1920 U.S. census enumeration, shown as living in St.Louis. As far as I know they had no children. Family lore has it that he killed himself after being caught robbing the mails. Certainly he asked his brother Morton for money frequently.

Morton stayed in Germany, married a German woman, Paula Marie Wagner (my grandmother), from a wealthy family in Leipzig-Gohlis. He studied chemistry at the University of Leipzig, earning his Ph.D. in Chemistry in @ 1907. Paula also was a Ph.D. student in Chemistry, the first woman in that department at the university. After a two year Fellowship in the U.S. at Harvard, Morton went back to Germany. He and Paula married in 1910, and came to the U.S. where Morton took a position as Professor of Physics at Worcester Polytechnic in Worcester MA. My mother Vera Mildred Masius was born in Worcester in 1919; her older sister Marguerite was born in Worcester in 1917. They are both alive, Marguerite lives in Paris with her husband Robert Hammond and my dad, Alan D. Ferguson, died a number of years ago. My mother lives nearby here in Lexington, MA. There is a slew of kids and grandkids.

My grandparents never went back to Germany to live, since WWI broke out soon after and it became impossible. My mother believes that she has Liebisch cousins in Germany, but because Leipzig was in East Germany, and due to the chaos of WWII, she has never been able to find out.

My mother also has wondered what happened to the mysterious Masius. I located a story in the Washington Post from 1907 when a Rosa E. Masius committed suicide and the police suspected her husband Alfred G. Masius. They appear to have lived in D.C. from at least 1890. (He was released by the police and never charged!) So, any more information on him would be welcome. An Alfred G.Masius shows up as a newly naturalized citizen age 24, emmigrated from France around 1879, but the dates don't match up with the husband of the dead Rosa. An Edith A. Bailey shows up in the Wellsboro Agitator as marrying an Edmund A. Masius in 1880. Those dates match, but I believe she was the Edith Maud Bailey who was Roderick and Morton's mother. Any more information would be welcome.


upupupdate
Morton Masius was born in 1883 and died in 1979. Since the above was written, Vera Mildred Masius and Marguerite have both died.

Further updates, from a transcript of the Wellsboro Agitator mentioned above:

1880-08-24
Married at Stony Fork Apr 28 1880 by Rev. J. A. Boyce, Mr. Edmund A. Masius and Miss Edith A. Bailey.

1889-04-30
Mrs. Edith Bailey Masius, who is well known in this borough, ws married on the 8th instant to Mr. Bernhard Liebisch, at Leipsic, Germany.

1892-05-04
Dead in Germany - Last Friday a dispatch was received here announcing the death of Mrs. Edith Bailey Liebisch at Leipsic, Germany that morning. She died of consumption with which disease she had been suffering for months. Mrs. Liebisch was the daughter of John W. Bailey. She went to Leipsic about five years ago to study in the university intending to fit herself for a teacher. Soon after she met Prof. Bernard Liebisch, a dealer in rare books and they were afterward married. When her health began to fail her sister Miss Mildred Bailey went to her and has ministered to her during her sickness. Mrs. Liebisch was nearly thirty three years of age. She leaves three children, two of them by a former marriage with Mr. Masius.

And here's his obituary from Physics Today -- April 1980:

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