Harry Fielding Reid

Harry Fielding Reid was born in Baltimore, the fourth of seven children of Andrew and Fanny Brooke Gwathmey Reid. Reid's mother was a descendant of Betty Washington Lewis, sister of George Washington; his father was a successful sugar merchant. The younger Reid's early education took him for at least one year to Switzerland; he is also known to have attended and graduated from the Pennsylvania Military Academy. In 1877 Reid enrolled at the newly founded Johns Hopkins University, from which he earned a A.B. in 1880 as part of the second graduating class. During the following year, he entered the Hopkins Ph.D. program, which was then revolutionizing American scientific and intellectual life. Reid studied under physicist Henry Rowland and mathematician J. J. Sylvester, two of the original Johns Hopkins professors. In February 1885 Reid was granted his doctorate with a dissertation on the spectra of platinum, an assignment typical of those that Rowland - the pioneering figure in modern spectral studies - gave his students.

While in graduate school Reid married Edith Gittings (1861–1954). Her father, James Gittings, was descended from a long-standing Baltimore County family with strong connections to the legal and medical communities of Maryland. Her mother was Mary Elizabeth MacGill, whose father was a physician in Hagerstown, MD. Together, Reid and his wife had two children: Francis Fielding Reid, born in 1892, and Doris Fielding Reid, born in 1895. Through the Gittings line the two Reid children were distant cousins to Wallis Warfield (born 1895-6), later Duchess of Windsor.

Through his mother, Harry Fielding Reid was a great-great-grandnephew of George Washington. In addition to this social connection, the Reids were closely involved in the academic world of Baltimore, particularly figures from the “heroic” era of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, like Sir William Osler, and graduate school friends such as Woodrow Wilson.

From the autumn of 1884 through the early summer of 1886, Reid spent time studying and traveling across Europe. During the fall of ‘84 and winter of ‘85, he may have worked at the laboratory of Hermann von Helmholtz in Berlin. His wife was with him throughout his stay, and they were joined for most of their travels by her mother, Mary Elizabeth MacGill Gittings. Mrs. Gittings left a diary, written on four small account books and now in the special collections department of the Johns Hopkins University library, that gives valuable information about their early years as a family. Among her observations was that her daughter regarded the German language as one of “sneezes and splutters.” Gittings found the wintertime climate of Berlin to be “foggy and dismal,” noted that the locals still ate dinner in mid-afternoon, and saw that some students (even visiting Americans) continued to fight duels.

During the autumn of 1885, Reid, his wife and mother-in-law settled into a rented house in Cambridge, UK, and remained there for the better part of a year. Reid was soon introduced to J. J. Thomson, a young physicist who had recently been appointed to a professorship at Trinity College and made director of the Cavendish Laboratory. This friendship, both professional and personal, was to continue within the Reid and Thomson families up to the present time (2007 CE). J. J. Thomson was 29 at the time they first met; Harry Fielding Reid was 26. Letters exchanged among the various family members reflect an intimacy that was born of their very early years together.

Both J. J. Thomson and his son George Paget (1892–1975) went on to win Nobel Prizes for their pioneering work in subatomic physics. J. J. still holds a unique place in the history of physics for his work in making the Cavendish Laboratory perhaps the finest-ever school for training research physicists.

In the fall of 1886 Reid accepted an appointment at the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, Ohio. He taught physics and mathematics there for eight years before being appointed an Associate at Johns Hopkins, a rank that was the equivalent of today's Assistant Professor. For reasons not yet clear, Reid did not take the job immediately but worked for one year at the newly founded University of Chicago. By the spring of 1896, however, he and his immediate family were back living in Baltimore for good, and they moved into a large townhouse on Cathedral Street, just a short distance from Mt. Vernon Place - then the heart of “Society” Baltimore - and the home of his parents.