Michael Fowler May 10, 2026
The UVa Physics Department, like Modern Physics itself, emerged in recognizable form in the years around 1900. In fact, though, there was earlier science in Virginia, both research and teaching, so we’ll mention a few early contributors to set the stage for subsequent development.
Perhaps surprisingly, the first person in Virginia who was a good fit for the word “scientist” as currently used was in the 1500’s, not that long after Columbus.
Thomas Harriot, 1560 – 1621, after graduating from Oxford in 1580, was hired by Sir Walter Raleigh to help plan expeditions to America, and in fact sailed on one in 1585, to Roanoke Island, North Carolina (at the time this whole area was called Virginia). Trying to learn all he could about the people and the land, Harriot spent time before embarking working with two native Americans who had been brought to England by a previous expedition. Harriot became fluent in the local Algonquian dialect. He observed that the native technology was less developed than in England, but believed that with education the Algonquin could be brought up to speed.
Harriot was the first to do many things, but he didn’t publish much. Fortunately, he described his results in letters to correspondents, including Kepler. One practical shipboard problem he discussed with Kepler was the best way to stack cannonballs. The answer is in layers, each layer a hexagonal pattern with each ball touching six others, then the layers are relatively displaced to give the snuggest fit. Gauss proved this was the most compact possible assuming the pattern is periodic, and it turns out to be still true in general—but this was only proved in 2017 (google Kepler conjecture if you want details). Harriot also saw the stacking as a possible arrangement of atoms in a solid, long before others even believed in atoms. (He had to be careful, belief in atoms was generally frowned upon.)
Harriot bought a 6X Dutch telescope in 1609 and drew sketches of craters on the Moon (just) before Galileo. He was the first to study sunspots telescopically (dangerous!). He used the modern binary number notation decades before Leibniz. He studied refraction, and found Snell’s law before Snell (although centuries after the Arabs.) He also gave methods for solving equations, including negative and imaginary roots, but didn’t publish, and this work was not appreciated, or even understood, until decades later.
Footnote: OK, he wasn’t quite in what we now call Virginia, but he was close enough, very much part of the culture at that time, and (IMHO) too interesting to ignore.
William Small (1734-1775) was a Scottish minister who became a professor at William and Mary College in Williamsburg, Virginia from 1758 to 1764. He had a huge influence on student Thomas Jefferson, who wrote of him (Wikipedia):
a man profound in most of the useful branches of science, with a happy talent of communication, correct and gentlemanly manners, and a large and liberal mind... from his conversation I got my first views of the expansion of science and of the system of things in which we are placed.
Small returned from Virginia to England with a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin to Matthew Boulton, who worked with Watt developing the first powerful steam engines, a crucial contribution to the industrial revolution. Small helped Boulton and Watt make the steam engine commercially successful by finding Wilkinson, a metalworker with the necessary boring precision to produce higher-pressure leakproof cylinders.
Boulton and Watt, together with Wedgwood, Priestley, Erasmus Darwin and others, met monthly (at full moon, for safety in walking) as a group of Birmingham scientists and industrialists. They called themselves the Lunar Society. In modern parlance, they were liberals, and when they published their names in a party list celebrating the French Revolution, royalist mobs burned down some of their houses. Priestley escaped to Pennsylvania.
Trivium: Priestley invented soda water, but refused to patent it, to make it easily and cheaply available.
In founding the University Jefferson thought and wrote a lot about a proposed curriculum, in particular in correspondence with his close friend the English chemist Joseph Priestley (mentioned above). It is evident from his writings that Jefferson assumed the entering undergraduates would all be fairly familiar with Latin and (ancient) Greek, from high school, he wrote that only finishing touches to those classics would be necessary. The students were mostly sons of very rich farmers (meaning dozens or hundreds of slaves) from throughout the South. Jefferson presumed they had good schooling or tutors in their precollege years—but perhaps he was too optimistic.
Jefferson’s proposed college curriculum contained substantial math and science: he was familiar with relatively recent mathematical developments: for example, he analyzed the optimal moldboard plow configuration using calculus. He coined the word catenary to describe the curve of a hanging chain (derived by Leibniz and others, and, upside down, an ideal arch, as Jefferson knew).
Jefferson was anxious that UVa students be educated at a level similar to that at established European universities, and to that end he hired European (mainly English) professors.
Charles Bonnycastle was recruited from England by Jefferson’s agent (and attorney) Francis Walker Gilmer. Bonnycastle was on the faculty from 1824 (the beginning of UVa instruction) to 1840 (when he died). His father had been a mathematics professor at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich, England, and wrote a well-known textbook, An Introduction to Algebra. Charles himself wrote a textbook, Inductive Geometry, modernizing his father’s axiomatic approach by beginning with understandable examples.
Unfortunately, the new (mainly English) faculty did not always adjust well to the University community. Many of the UVa students were very rich and spoiled. They saw themselves as socially superior to faculty, especially foreigners. And (unlike England at this time) Virginia was a slave state. The students were not allowed to bring their slaves to school with them, but most of their parents had many slaves, and the faculty had slaves (which were considered property). For example, Bonnycastle had a slave called Fielding, who was attacked by students for alleged insolence (1838). Bonnycastle intervened and was beaten, but the students involved were not disciplined. In fact, student behavior was generally getting out of hand. In 1840 a student fatally shot a professor. The University was not quite developing as Jefferson had envisioned: he got the buildings and faculty more or less right, but apparently had not anticipated the arrogance and ignorance of many of the spoiled rich students, and the consequent toxic social dynamics in a crowded community, half of whom were slaves. Fortunately, the professor’s death had an overall sobering effect and student behavior began to improve.
The strategy of hiring largely from abroad continued after Jefferson: in 1841 James Joseph Sylvester, one of the leading mathematicians of the nineteenth century, joined the faculty. He was the first Jewish professor at any American college (being Jewish made finding a college job at that time difficult in America or Britain). He graduated from St. John’s College, Cambridge (the same as Erasmus Darwin, and in fact my own college).
Sylvester was a cockney (a native Londoner), and not easily intimidated. When a student attacked him with a bludgeon (for allegedly insulting the student’s younger brother), Sylvester responded with his cane, which was also a sword. Luckily, he hit a rib (accounts vary) so the wound was not too serious, but after the blow the student was motionless and bleeding on the floor. Sylvester decided this was a good time to leave town (early 1842). He went to New York, then London, working as an actuary but also working with Cayley on groundbreaking algebra. In 1855 he became a professor at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, following Bonnycastle’s father. Later, from 1876 to 1883 he was a professor at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, after which he returned to England, to a chair at Oxford. (Trivia: he coined many new mathematical terms, for example, matrix.)
William Barton Rogers was a professor of natural philosophy (meaning science) at UVa from 1835 to 1853. He was one of four sons of Patrick Kerr Rogers and Hannah Blythe, all four achieved distinction in science, following their father who was a professor at William and Mary from 1819 until 1828.
(A note about the father: Patrick Kerr Rogers was born in Ireland. In May 1798 he wrote newspaper articles in Dublin criticizing the British government, and the reaction led him to flee to America (an 84-day journey), arriving in Philadelphia in August 1798. He promptly entered medical school, gaining his MD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1802. He moved to Baltimore in 1812 and ran an apothecary’s shop, but was piling up debt until his appointment at William and Mary in 1819.)
In fact, William Rogers succeeded his father at William and Mary, becoming professor in 1828.
In 1835, he became a professor of natural philosophy at UVa. The same year, his brother Henry Darwin Rogers (named to honor Lunar Man Erasmus Darwin) was appointed professor of geology and minerology at the University of Pennsylvania (after spending a year or so in England). The two brothers worked together (as state geologists of Virginia and Pennsylvania respectively) analyzing the Appalachian mountains, in particular the locations of coal deposits (the main industrial fuel at the time) and how different grades of coal must have evolved during mountain formation.
At the same time, William Rogers was developing science education: he wrote short, lucid texts on mechanics and materials, his lectures were legendary. He played a major role in the creation of the Engineering School at UVa (only the fourth in the US). However, he felt that UVa was not a perfect fit for the kind of technically focused large-scale engineering education he envisioned. He persuaded the Massachusetts legislature to finance an ambitious college: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, and he was its first president, in 1865.
In 1849 William Rogers married Emma Savage, daughter of a Boston banker (this helped MIT get going). In 1853, they moved from Charlottesville to Boston. During his time at UVa, Rogers had as many as six slaves. (Although apparently they were referred to as servants.) Emma taught at least one of them, the cook Isabella Gibbons, to read and write. After moving to Boston, Rogers stated his antislavery sympathies more clearly. Emma’s brother James fought for the Union in the Civil War, and died of bullet wounds, ironically in Charlottesville.
To get a glimpse of the chaotic everyday social dynamics at UVa when Rogers was living there, we quote from Educated in Tyranny: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson's University. University of Virginia Press:
“In one case the faculty noted that breakfasts were being supplied by a small boy, “belonging to no one in the University, but living with a free woman, the wife of Dr. Magills’ servant, in the basement of Mr. Roger’s house.” In this short phrase, we learn that there was a young black boy, probably not owned by anyone, living with a free African American woman, who was considered married to an enslaved man owned by Dr. Magill. It is not explained why, but Magill resided in Pavilion III on the west side and the boy, wife, and servant all lived in the basement of Professor Roger’s pavilion, on the east side.”
And, it might be added, those basements could be damp. In 1855, Francis Smith (see below) was reprimanded by Allen Magruder because a slave Lucy, leashed by Smith from Magruder’s wife, was sleeping on a stone floor. Smith was told to put down planks.
When William Rogers moved to Boston in 1853, he was replaced as Professor of Natural Philosophy by Francis Henry Smith (1829 – 1928) who held the position until 1907. During the Civil War, he served as the Commissioner of Weights and Measures, an appointment by the Confederate Congress. (Note: in googling, this is not Francis Henney Smith, of VMI.)
To quote at this point from the UVa Astronomy website: ”Mathematics professor Francis H. Smith wrote to Barbour (the Rector) in April 1869 with suggestions and approximated costs for erecting an observatory, complete with all the necessary first-rate equipment of the day. As stated before, the financial situation of the University in the late 1860's probably made Smith's suggestions seem impossible, so the Board tabled discussion of astronomy indefinitely.
Attempts to bring a chair of practical astronomy to the University of Virginia all proved unsuccessful until Leander J. McCormick of Chicago entered the picture in the early 1870's.”
Although the McCormack Harvester Company had suffered in the Chicago fire, Leander came through with enough money to buy the best telescope in the world, a 26-inch refractor, dedicated in 1885, and still in operation.
Francis H. Smith’s later work (1895 on) with the Physics Department is described in the 1968 essay by Frederick Brown.
Smith is the link connecting the Rogers era to the modern-day Physics Department.
On the domestic front, Isabella Gibbons continued as cook (still officially enslaved) for the Smiths until the war, when she became a nurse, treating the wounded from both sides. Sheridan’s Union troops arrived in Charlottesville in March 1865. Fortunately, little damage was done. Later, Gibbons worked with others to organize a school for black students, which evolved into the present-day Jefferson school.