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I wanted a picture of
Professor Mann. No luck. |
In the early twentieth century, one of the major figures of the American Esperanto movement was Benjamin Pickman Mann (who typically went by B. Pickman Mann). He was an entomologist who worked at the Department of Agriculture (along with Karl Kellerman), and formed part of the group of Esperantists at the Department of Agriculture. His father was the prominent American educator,
Horace Mann. But neither of them are related to the Professor Mann of the University of Chicago mentioned in the
New-York Tribune on April 10, 1907. It’s a common name, and though Professor Mann’s ancestry does go back to New England, the lineages never seem to converge.
Professors in the Esperanto movement at the beginning of the twentieth century seemed to be pretty well divided between professors of language (which seems obvious) and professors of science (whose interest probably derived from having to slough through journals in a variety of languages—that was
Wilhelm Ostwald’s claim). And so we’ve seen
chemists,
biologists, and now it’s time to add a physicist. Professor Mann was not a professor of languages, but was Charles Riborg Mann, who in 1907 was an associate professor of physics at the University of Chicago. As he was promoted to associate professor in that year, in April, he might have still been an assistant professor.
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