Charles Francis Himes (1838-1918): Portrait of a Photographer

The life of Charles Francis Himes, professor of physics at Dickinson College from 1865 to 1896, was one of many and varied pursuits. He was a scientist, an educator, and a historian; and with each of these roles his interest and achievements in photography were integrated.

In the late twentieth century photography is taken granted. Anyone nowadays can buy a camera and take a picture, regardless of knowledge or skill; development and printing are done commercially; and photographs are used in every discipline. In Himes' time, however, the art and science of photography were still growing and developing in basic and significant ways. It was more a science than an avocation. Himes, who had been an amateur photographer since 1858, was aware of these developments and, as an experimental scientist, was led to investigate new ideas in photography and to consider their applications to science, history, and education. He was, he wrote, "a constant reader of its [photography's] literature, ... one enjoying each advance, each new application, and the rapid growth of photography as an amateur art ... "¹ And he had participated in, and contributed to, those advances. "Photography," he declared in his address at the opening of a science building at Dickinson College in 1885,

that a comparatively few years ago surprised us with its reproductions of human portraits, has almost unnoticed become so silently incorporated with many processes of every day life, that, blot out all the portrait galleries of the world, and it would still retain its importance as an influential factor in many industries.²

Born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in 1838, Himes attended the New Oxford Collegiate and Medical Institute in Adams County, to which his parents moved while he was still a lad. 3 The principal was Dr. M.D. G. Pfeiffer, a German physician, a graduate of the University of Berlin, with advanced professional ideas. There he began to study Latin at age eight, and Greek at ten. Later in life, although he advocated and made possible the substitution of sciences for classical languages in the junior and senior years of college, Himes did not deny the desirability of training in the classical languages because of the mental discipline they required.

Himes applied for admission to the sophomore class at Dickinson in 1853, but was turned down because of his age. He was about to apply to Harvard College when Dickinson set aside its rule and examined him. He had a happy and successful undergraduate life—he was, for example, a founder and ever afterwards a loyal member of the Phi Kappa Sigma fraternity. He was graduated in 1855 and retained a warm attachment to his alma mater for the remainder of his life. For the next few years Himes was a teacher, first in the Wyoming Conference Academy of the Methodist Church in Wayne County, Pennsylvania, then in the Baltimore Female College, in public schools in Missouri, and finally, in 1860-63, he was professor of mathematics in Troy University in Troy, New York. In 1863 Himes went abroad, where he spent two years in Germany and received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Giessen in 1865. That spring he was elected professor of natural science at Dickinson, the first person with an earned doctorate to be named to the faculty. When the department was enlarged and divided in 1885 Himes was named professor of physics. He retired in 1896.

Knowledgeable and enthusiastic about his subject, Himes was respected and well liked by his students. He introduced laboratory instruction, translating and publishing a German laboratory manual for class use. To stimulate their interest he organized a student scientific society in 1867 (whose members performed experiments and delivered lectures before their fellows), and he compiled a short history of the society in 1877. He inaugurated a course for teachers who might want to offer instruction in the natural sciences. And upon his colleagues and the trustees of the College he repeatedly urged the claims of the sciences for a more equal status with the classics in the curriculum. "How far can a liberally educated man afford to be ignorant of the facts and laws of the material universe around him," he asked in his Sketch of Dickinson College (1879), which was essentially a plea for the sciences and a science building at the College.⁴ The Tome Scientific Building, with lecture rooms, laboratories, and a museum, was erected in 1885, a building that he proclaimed at its dedication "faces the great advancing and expanding future, not the historic past."

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