Coffin, James Henry

Coffin, James Henry, 1806–73, American mathematician and meteorologist, was professor of mathematics and physics, Lafayette College, 1846–73. In an observatory which he built on Mt. Greylock, Mass., while he was associated (1840–43) with Williams College, he developed a self-registering anemometer. As one of the first collaborators with the Smithsonian Institution, he published Winds of the Northern Hemisphere (1853), Psychometrical Tables (1856), and The Orbit and Phenomena of a Meteoric Fire Ball (1869).

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