Profile | Quincy Whitney

Creativity—Robert Frost, Most Celebrated Poet

Creativity Frost was born in San Francisco, California, to Robert Lee Frost, a journalist, and Isabelle Moodie, a teacher. In 1885, when his father died of tuberculosis, to honor his father’s wishes to be buried where he was born, his mother took a train with Robert and his sister Jeanie to Lawrence, Massachusetts. They relocated there, as Frost’s paternal grandfather William Prescott Frost would make sure his grandson had good schooling. At his death on January 29, 1963, Frost had become so popular, it might be argued that he had become a kind of unofficial national poet laureate. Perhaps he ...

Ingenuity—First Medical X-Ray

Ingenuity and Enterprise The momentous discovery came about because of the interaction between two brothers—Dartmouth astronomy professor Dr. Edwin Brant Frost and Dr. Gilman D. Frost, Dartmouth Medical School professor and director of the Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital. Many years later, E.B. Frost reminisced in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine: During the years 1887–1889 the writer had been assistant to Professor Emerson in the Physical Laboratory on the ground floor of Reed Hall, and had the privilege of using the apparatus there. When the cable hints were received about Roentgen’s success, it immediately seemed worthwhile to test the numerous vacuum tubes ...

Women—Sarah Josepha Hale, Editor

Pioneer Woman Editor: Sarah Josepha Hale Sarah Josepha Hale of Newport, New Hampshire, was arguably the most influential woman in the nineteenth century. As editor of the Boston-based Ladies’ Magazine from 1828 to 1836, and then first editor of the widely popular Godey’s Lady’s Book of Philadelphia from 1837 to 1877, Hale created an entire cultural consciousness about the status of women and the development of American literature through her magazine. Hale reviewed thousands of books, wrote monthly editorials and published the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lydia Sigourney, in addition to contributing her ...

Firsts—First Mountaintop Newspaper

First Mountaintop Newspaper: Among the Clouds Storm-bound atop Mount Washington during the summer of 1874, Henry Burt surveyed the cog railway, the carriage road, the first-rate hotel, post office and telegraph office, and remarked, “There ought to be a newspaper here for those who have to wait for the clouds to lift.” In the July 18, 1877, first edition, postdated July 20, Burt wrote of his passion for the mountains in his opening editorial: “We never feel so near the Infinite as when looking up these lofty mountains and the thousand beauties that are limited only by human vision.” When ...