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Frank Elmore Ross
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San Francisco, California, USA
Altadena, Los Angeles County, California, USA
Biography
Frank Elmore Ross was the son of Daniel Walter Ross and Catherine Harris (known as Cassie). Daniel Ross was born in Scotland in 1833 and emigrated to the United States. He married Cassie Harris on 7 September 1871, in Delaware, Iowa and by 1873 they were living on Broadway in San Francisco, California. Daniel Ross was a carpenter who, according to [8], "lost a fortune during the gold mine boom." Daniel and Cassie Ross had two children: Frank Elmore Ross (born 2 April 1874), the subject of this biography; and Walter Newton Ross (born on 1 December 1875). Walter Ross married Emma R St Clair on 2 August 1905. He worked for the US Government as a computer and later as a draftsman. He died on 27 March 1957, in San Diego. We shall say a little more about Walter Ross in what follows.According to [8], Frank Ross's:-
... family moved to San Rafael around 1882, where he went to grammar school and worked part time in a printer's shop.Seth Nicholson, however, states [9]:-
Frank Ross was born in San Francisco on April 2, 1874, and received his early education in the schools of that city.We have not been able to confirm which of these is correct. If he did attend school in San Rafael, which we think is most likely, then he would have been a pupil at the grammar school on Fourth and Shaver Streets and then at San Rafael High School which is the oldest High School in Marin County. It was founded in 1888 and shared space with the grammar school. Certainly his favourite subject at school was mathematics and he decided to continue studying that subject at the University of California Berkeley.
The University of California Berkeley had been founded in 1868 and named after the mathematician and philosopher George Berkeley. The first chair of the Department of Mathematics was William Thomas Welcker, a West Point graduate and Confederate veteran, but, after a quarrel with the Regents, the chair was declared vacant in May 1881. In May 1882 Irving Stringham became the chair and he was the only professor in the Department when Ross was an undergraduate. Ross graduated with a B.S. from Berkeley in 1896 and was appointed as a teacher at the Mount Tamalpais Military Academy in San Rafael. This Academy had been founded in 1890 by a Presbyterian minister who hoped to develop it into a College. This idea was quickly abandoned and it educated boys for entry to university giving them military skills. Graduates were admitted to Berkeley without examination. Ross taught mathematics and physics at the Mount Tamalpais Military Academy in 1896-97 then accepted a fellowship offered by the Lick Observatory.
The Lick Observatory, on the summit of Mount Hamilton in the Diablo Range of mountains in California, was constructed between 1876 and 1887 using a bequest from James Lick. It had been taken over by the Regents of the University of California in 1888. James E Keeler had been one of the original astronomical staff and, after seven years at the Allegheny Observatory, returned to Lick becoming its director in 1898. He introduced the graduate fellowship scheme and three graduates, one of whom was Ross, were awarded a fellowship beginning in 1898. The idea was that the fellowship holders would spend part of their time with classes at Berkeley and part on experimental work at the Observatory. Ross, however, resigned after working for a few months, stating that he had problems with his eyes. In fact he admitted to a friend years later that the "eye problem" was an excuse. Rather he was extremely bored carrying out the routine reductions involved in observational work; he wanted something more challenging.
In 1899 he registered to study for a PhD in mathematics at Berkeley. He was assigned Irving Stringham as his official advisor but in fact he was more attracted to the research that Ernest Wilczynski was publishing. Wilczynski had been appointed as an instructor in mathematics at Berkeley in 1898 and he discussed with Ross his papers On Linearoid Differential Equations (1899) and On Continuous Binary Linearoid Groups and the Corresponding Differential Equations and
It is the object of the present paper to investigate systems of differential equations which belong to a ternary linearoid group. The investigation is confined to those cases which are essentially distinct. The last paragraph is devoted to algebraic theorems on characteristic equations. Particular cases of these theorems were first noticed in attempting to treat two-parameter groups in their unreduced form. The results thus obtained have been generalised. Differential equations belonging to linearoid groups have been studied by E J Wilczynski. He has proved the existence theorem and obtained the differential equations belonging to a binary group.He submitted a paper, which was essentially his thesis, to the American Journal of Mathematics on 23 April 1901 and it was published in 1903 (see [12]). We note that both of the papers by Wilczynski which Ross's thesis builds on were also published in the American Journal of Mathematics.
In the year 1901-01 Ross was employed by the Watson Fund to compute the orbits of asteroids. James C Watson (1838-1880) was Professor of Astronomy and Director of the Observatory at the University of Michigan. He discovered twenty-two asteroids during his career and he bequeathed a fund for the purpose of computing the orbits of these asteroids. This is a highly non-trivial mathematical task since they are all significantly perturbed by Jupiter. The work was carried out under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences and, at the time Ross graduated with his PhD, the chairman of the Watson trustees was Simon Newcomb. In the twenty years following Watson's death little progress had been made but, working under Armin Otto Leuschner (1868-1953), Ross together with R T Crawford, did outstanding work and turned the data over to Leuschner for publication. We note that Russell Tracy Crawford was awarded a PhD in astronomy from Berkeley in 1901, the same year as Ross was awarded his PhD in mathematics.
In 1902 Ross was appointed as an Assistant in the Nautical Almanac Office in Washington D C. After a year, he became Simon Newcomb's assistant at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. He analysed planetary orbital data with Newcomb and, at Newcomb's suggestion, computed an orbit of Phoebe, the ninth satellite of Saturn. He published Investigations on the orbit of Phoebe in the Annals of Harvard College Observatory in 1905. It was his first paper on astronomy and has the following Introduction:-
A ninth satellite of the planet Saturn was discovered in March 1899, by Professor W H Pickering, of Harvard College Observatory. The large number of observations of this object which have been secured up to the present time, extending over a period of more than six years, and which are now available, make it possible to derive the elements of its orbit with considerable certainty. On account of its extreme faintness, and accurate ephemeris is necessary in order to permit its being observed and followed by the great refractors of the world.On 4 May 1904, Ross married Julia Margaret Benton (1878-1941) in St Stephens Church, Sewickley, Allegheny, Pennsylvania. It was announced in the Pittsburgh Post [15]:-
An interesting wedding of today will be that of Miss J Margaret Benton, daughter of the Rev and Mrs Robert A Benton, of Sewickley, and Dr Frank Elmore Ross, of Washington, D. C. The ceremony will be performed in St Stephen's Protestant Episcopal Church, of Sewickley, of which the bride's father is rector. The maid of honour will be Miss Jane Glenn, Wooster, and the bridesmaids will be Miss Mary Craig Chaplin and Miss Eleanor Adams Gormley, of Sewickley. The ushers will be Dr John R Benton of Washington, D. C., Stewart Campbell Spencer and John Anson Emery.Frank and Margaret Ross had a son Robert Donald Ross who was born in Sewickley, Pennsylvania on 28 November 1905. As an electrical aeronautical engineer, he worked for the Westinghouse Electric Company, the U.S. Navy Department, and retired from NASA after 25 years of service, having worked with the Apollo space programme. He died on 19 January 1996.
For more information about Robert Donald Ross and other members of the Ross family, see THIS LINK.
Ross's brother, Walter Ross, also worked at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. He married Emma F St Clair on 2 August 1905, with Frank Ross as his best man. The Washington Evening star reports [14]:-
Yesterday morning at the residence of Mrs W F Hardy, 1118 10th street northwest, her daughter, Miss Emma Frances St Clair, was married to Mr Walter Ross of the Carnegie Institute. The bride was becomingly attired in a travelling costume, and was attended by Miss Tessie Ostrander, while the groom's brother, Mr Frank Ross. also of the Carnegie Institute, acted as best man.In 1905 Ross was appointed as director of the International Latitude Observatory in Gaithersburg, Maryland. This was only about 20 miles from Washington and, in partnership with his brother Walter, they bought and ran a cigar store in Washington. In Gaithersburg, Ross completed the computations of the sixth and seventh satellites of Jupiter which he had been working on at the Carnegie Institute and published these in the papers Elements and ephemeris of Jupiter's sixth satellite in Astronomische Nachrichten (1905), Elements and ephemeris of Jupiter's seventh satellite in Astronomische Nachrichten (1906), New elements of Jupiter's seventh satellite in Astronomische Nachrichten (1907), and Semi-definitive elements of Jupiter's sixth satellite in the Lick Observatory Bulletin (1907). He also published An Application of Stirling's Interpolation Formula in the American Mathematical Monthly in 1905. He did, however, want to work in an observatory rather than computing with other people's data, and he was very keen to return to California so, in 1912, he wrote to William Wallace Campbell (1862-1938), the director of the Lick Observatory from 1901 to 1930, asking if any positions were available - none were.
He continued to publish papers, for example on the orbit of Mars and the Moon's mean longitude. In 1915 he published the 127-page report Geodesy: Latitude Observations with Photographic Zenith Tube at Gaithersburg, Md. Donald Osterbrock writes [11]:-
... at the observatory in Gaithersburg, Ross developed, almost completely on his own, a photographic method of making the necessary measurements which was at least twice as accurate as the previously used visual method. However, the funds for the project ran out and he lost his job in 1915. The Naval Observatory took over the "photographic zenith tube" Ross had invented and demonstrated, but turned it over to its own astronomers to use.Ross's marriage to Margaret Benton had not been successful and they had divorced. While still at Gaithersburg, Ross married his second wife Elizabeth Matilda Bischof, the daughter of German parents, in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, on 10 June 1913. They had a son Alan Kenneth Ross born in Omaha, Nebraska on 2 October 1915. All this meant that Ross had problems when he lost his job at Gaithersburg for, although he continued to earn some money calculating planetary ephemerides for the Nautical Almanac Office, it was not enough to support him, his wife and their son.
Perley Gilman Nutting (1873-1949) was awarded a BA by Stanford University in 1897, then studied for a Master's Degree in physics at Berkeley where he got to know Ross. After being awarded a PhD by Cornell University in 1903 Nutting went to Washington where he worked at George Washington University and then at the National Bureau of Standards. He had kept in touch with Ross even after leaving Washington in 1912 when he joined the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, New York. Nutting arranged for Ross to be appointed as a computer at Kodak by the end of 1916 and, although at first he lived alone in Rochester, his wife and son joined them there in January 1917. Nutting founded the Optical Society of America in 1916 and was its President in 1916-17. Ross gave a summary of the work he was undertaking for Kodak on accurate astronomical positional measurements on photographic plates at the first meeting of the Optical Society in New York City on 28 December 1916.
The United States declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917, nearly three years after the conflict began. Ross completed a World War I Draft giving: Physical Build Slender; Height Short; Hair Colour Black; and Eye Colour Brown. Soon after the United States entered the war, Kodak began the task of rapidly developing a camera for aerial photography. Ross had to stop the research he was carrying out on photographic plates and join the effort on the camera. By the time the war ended in November 1918 Kodak had produced a camera but had not yet begun production. It did, however, greatly influence Ross's career since he realised that further development of this camera could lead to excellent cameras for astronomical use. He returned to his work on photographic plates but, in parallel, began working on improving lens designs for cameras. Again he wrote to Campbell in October 1918 about a possible position at Lick, but received a negative response. Ross, keen to gain a position in an observatory, particularly one in California, saw his work on lenses and cameras as a way to gain such a position.
On 21 December 1920 Frank and Elizabeth Ross's second child, Barbara Helen Ross, was born in Berkley, California. You can read more about her at THIS LINK.
By 1920 Frank Schlesinger (1871-1943), the director of Yale Observatory, had learnt of Ross's designs and ordered a camera to be made for Yale. Ross published his designs in the paper A Wide-Angle Astronomical Doublet published in the Journal of the Optical Society of America in 1921. Ross wrote to Campbell at Lick just as his paper was appearing suggesting that his lenses would be ideal for observing the 1923 solar eclipse. Indeed Campbell ordered lenses for two Ross cameras. He wrote to Ross in 1921 to say how impressed he was with his work and how he would want him at Lick, but unfortunately funds were still not available. Soon, however, Ross was offered a position at Lick but there were difficulties over his salary and the starting date. Offers were made and rejected until eventually Campbell heard a rumour the Ross's marriage was in difficulties and, not wanting a couple with marriage problems in the isolated mountain top location, all offers were withdrawn.
In 1924 Ross accepted a position at Yerkes Observatory located in Williams Bay, Wisconsin and operated by the University of Chicago's Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics [9]:-
At the Yerkes Observatory, Dr Ross re-photographed stellar fields that had been photographed earlier by Professor Barnard, and, in comparing the new plates with the older ones, found many variable stars and stars with large proper motions. These discoveries were reported regularly in the Astronomical Journal, and by 1931 his lists contained 379 new variable stars and 869 proper-motion stars. He also took many excellent photographs of the large nebulous regions of the sky and published, with Miss Mary Calvert, a photographic atlas of the Milky Way.In 1928 the Caltech founder George Ellery Hale persuaded the Rockefeller Foundation trustees to commit a large sum to building a 200-inch reflecting telescope at the Palomar Observatory. John August Anderson (1876-1959) was to be in charge of the work and, after discussions with Hale, they contacted Ross asking him to spend some months working with them. He agreed and made various visits to Mount Wilson. When back at Yerkes, he spent half his time observing and half computing optical designs for instruments for Palomar.
At its opposition in 1926, Dr Ross photographed Mars in different colours with the Mount Wilson 60-inch reflector and with the Lick 36-inch refractor. In 1927 he again visited the Mount Wilson Observatory and made a photographic study of Venus. His photographs of Venus in ultraviolet light called attention to the vague temporary markings, or shadings, in that planet's atmosphere.
Ross continued to design bigger and better cameras that were purchased by many of the leading observatories. W W Morgan writes [8]:-
A series of photographs (published 1927-1931) with a new lens of his own design revealed new features associated with some of the best-known nebulosities of the northern sky. This work culminated in 1934 with the publication of the magnificent Atlas of the Milky Way with Mary R Calvert. This atlas, which consists of original photographic prints, revealed for the first time some of the large-scale characteristics of the northern Milky Way. The photographs were obtained with a five-inch lens designed by Ross.In 1935 he published the paper Lens Systems for Correcting Coma of Mirrors in the Astrophysical Journal. The Abstract reads as follows:-
The most important work of Ross's life was the introduction of correcting lens systems for use with large reflecting telescopes. His correcting lenses for the Mt Palomar 200-inch reflector increased the size of the usable field greatly, and made possible much of the remarkable work of the late Walter Baade. The importance of the Ross correcting lenses in twentieth-century astronomy is so great that, had he done no other work, he would still have occupied a high place.
The only serious optical defect that is outstanding in the usual reflecting telescope system is coma. The various modifications which have been proposed, and in some cases introduced, to correct coma are described and their limitations are pointed out. On the initiative of Dr G E Hale, the writer has investigated the optics of a simple lens system placed near the focus of a parabolic mirror, which will correct the outstanding coma and at the same time will not introduce other aberrations of a serious amount. Employing the third-order equations of general optical theory, a solution has been obtained for a two-piece lens system which eliminates coma and astigmatism but leaves outstanding spherical aberration and distortion. These, however, are not serious in the problems of photometry and astrometry requiring the use of a lens of this type. The third-order solution is found not to be unique, two parameters being undetermined. The double family of lenses is shown in Figure 2. It is not a simple matter to choose the one lens in this double family which will function best under any given set of conditions of focal length and aperture ratio. The difficulty is due to corrective terms introduced by the fifth- and higher-order aberrations. These can only be obtained by the ray-tracing methods customary in the computation of complicated lens systems. Corrective lenses have been computed by the writer for a number of telescopes, notably the Mount Wilson 100-inch and 60-inch, and have proved useful in problems of photometry and astrometry.The lenses described by Ross in this paper are now called the 'Ross corrector'.
Ross retired in 1939 and in that year married his third wife Anna Olivia Lee on 21 August 1939 in Dubuque, Iowa. The couple moved to Pasadena, Los Angeles, California where they lived at 1665 Mountain Street. They then made their home in Altadena, Los Angeles, California living at 1100 Mt Lowe Drive. He died at this home at the age of 86 in 1960. Donald Osterbrock writes [11]:-
He is remembered for the Ross lens, Ross photometer, Ross high proper-motion stars, and Ross photographic correctors for large reflecting telescopes, and he played an important role in the design of the Palomar Hale 200-inch reflector.Let us end by noting an inconsistency in census forms regarding Frank and Walter Ross's mother, Cassie Ross. On the 1880 Census form, completed when Frank and Walter were 5 and 6 years old, Carrie Ross is recorded as born in Massachusetts with her mother and father also born in Massachusetts. When Frank Ross completes Census forms between 1910 and 1950, he gives his mother as born in Canada (sometimes more specifically in Nova Scotia). When Walter Ross completes Census forms he records his mother as born in Ireland.
References (show)
- E Baum, Ross, Frank Elmore, in T Hockey (ed.), The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers (Springer, New York, NY, 2007), 984-985.
- Frank E Ross, Physics History Network, American Institute of Physics (2024).
https://history.aip.org/phn/11608039.html - Dr Frank E Ross, The Los Angeles Times (Friday, 23 September 1960).
- Dr Frank Ross. Memorial Rites will be Sunday, Los Angeles Mirror (Friday 23 September 1960), 35.
- Frank Elmore Ross, genealogy.com.
- Frank Elmore Ross, prabook.com.
https://prabook.com/web/frank.ross/1104745#google_vignette - Frank Elmore Ross, 1896 Yearbook, University of California Berkeley (1896).
- W W Morgan, Frank Elmore Ross, Biographical Memoirs, National Academy of Sciences 39 (1967), 391-402.
- S B Nicholson, Frank Elmore Ross, 1874-1960, Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific 73 (432) (1961), 182-184.
- W Osborn, Frank Elmore Ross and his Variable Star Discoveries, The Journal of the American Association of Variable Star Observers 40 (1) (2012), 133-140.
- D E Osterbrock, Frank Ross, His Ross Lens Design, and the Lick Observatory 20-inch Astrograph, Journal of the History of Astronomy 38 (1) (2007), 31-73.
- F E Ross, On Differential Equations Belonging to a Ternary Linearoid Group, American Journal of Mathematics 25 (2) (1903), 179-205.
- G van Biesbroeck, Frank Elmore Ross (obituary), Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 2 (1961), 276-278.
- Walter Ross marries, Washington Evening star, District of Columbia (Thursday 3 August 1905).
- Wedding of To-Day, The Pittsburgh Post (Wednesday 4 May 1904).
- The wedding of Miss Margaret Benton, The San Francisco Call and Post (Monday, 07 March 1904).
- Will Wed a San Franciscan, San Francisco Chronicle (Monday 7 March 1904).
- St Stephen's Protestant Church, The Pittsburgh Post (Sunday 24 April 1904).
- The marriage of Miss Julia Margaret Benton, Washington Evening star, District of Columbia (3 May 1904).
- Robert D Ross, Daily Press, Newport News, Virginia (Monday 22 January 1996).
- Alan Kenneth Ross, The Idaho Statesman (Wednesday, 17 December 2003).
- F E Ross, Photographs of Mars, 1926, Astrophysical Journal 64 (1926), 243-249.
- F E Ross, Photographs of Venus, Astrophysical Journal 68 (1928), 57-92.
- F E Ross, M R Calvert and K Newman, Atlas of the Northern Milky Way (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1934).
Additional Resources (show)
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Written by J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
Last Update March 2025
Last Update March 2025