Joseph William Winthrop Spencer
Joseph William Spencer | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born |
1851-03-26 |
| Died | 1921-10-09 (70 years) |
| Other names | Joseph William Winthrop Spencer |
| Occupation | Geologist, Professor |
Joseph William Winthrop Spencer was a Canadian geomorphologist.[1]
According to The Dictionary of Canadian Biography he was born in Dundas, Upper Canada, in 1851, as Joseph William Spencer.[1] He added the middle name Winthrop in adulthood, because he believed he was distantly related to a prominent American family, named Winthrop.
As a teenager he worked for a druggist in nearby Hamilton.[1]
In 1871 he attended McGill University in Montreal.[1] After graduation he worked for the Geologic Survey of Canada, and a mining company, in Michigan, before traveling to Gottingen, Germany, where he earned a PhD in Geology. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography reports he was just the second Canadian to earn a PhD in Geology.
After earning his PhD, he worked as a professor of Chemistry and Geology at King’s College, in Windsor, Nova Scotia, for two years, before accepting a post at the University of Missouri.[1] He was chair of geology and mineralogy and the first curator of the University's new natural history museum. In 1888 he moved to a professor position at the University of Georgia, and then, in 1894 he worked for a year in Washington DC, before he returned to Canada.
Although Spencer was highly regarded, during his lifetime, he held views at odds with current thinking.[1] He believed the proglacial lakes that became the current Great Lakes were brackish branches of the ocean. He failed to understand how thick the glaciers were. And, although he was the first to recognize that the beaches and escarpments that marked the shores of the proglacial lakes sloped slightly, and varied in elevation, he did not understand this was due to rebounding once the surface was freed of the glaciers great weight.
References
[edit | edit source]{{reflist|refs= [1]