RARE ! Signature officiel coupe montée "Président Harvard" Charles William Eliot

Up for auction a RARE! "Harvard President" Charles William Eliot Mounted Cut Signature.

ES-683A

Charles William Eliot (March

20, 1834 – August 22, 1926) was an American

academic

who was selected as Harvard's president in 1869. A member of the

prominent Eliot family of Boston, he transformed the

provincial college into the pre-eminent American research university. Eliot served until 1909,

having the longest term as president in the university's history. Charles Eliot was a scion

of the wealthy Eliot family of Boston.

He was the son of politician Samuel Atkins Eliot and his wife Mary (née Lyman) and

was the grandson of banker Samuel Eliot, being one of five siblings

and the only boy. Eliot graduated from Boston Latin School in 1849 and from Harvard University in 1853. He was later made

an honorary member of the Hasty Pudding. Although he had high

expectations and obvious scientific talents, the first fifteen years of Eliot's

career were less than auspicious. He was appointed Tutor in Mathematics at

Harvard in the fall of 1854, and studied chemistry with Josiah P.

Cooke. In 1858, he was promoted to Assistant Professor of

Mathematics and Chemistry. He taught competently, wrote some technical pieces

on chemical impurities in industrial metals, and busied himself

with schemes for the reform of Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School. But his real

goal, appointment to the Rumford Professorship of Chemistry, eluded him. This

was a particularly bitter blow because of a change in his family's economic

circumstances—the financial failure of his father, Samuel Atkins Eliot, in

the Panic of 1857.

Eliot had to face the fact that "he had nothing to look to but his

teacher's salary and a legacy left to him by his grandfather Lyman." After

a bitter struggle over the Rumford chair, Eliot left Harvard in 1863. His

friends assumed that he would "be obliged to cut chemistry and go into

business in order to earn a livelihood for his family." But instead, he

used his grandfather's legacy and a small borrowed sum to spend

the next two years studying the educational systems of the Old World in Europe.