Warren Colburn (born in

Dedham, Massachusetts Dedham ( ) is a town in and the county seat of Norfolk County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 25,364 at the 2020 census. It is located on Boston's southwest border. On the northwest it is bordered by Needham, on the southwest b ...

, 1 March 1793; died in Lowell, Massachusetts, 13 September 1833) was a Massachusetts businessman, mathematician, and educator.

Biography

His parents were poor, and when a boy he worked in factories in the different villages to which they moved. He learned the

machinist A machinist is a tradesperson or trained professional who not only operates machine tools, but also has the knowledge of tooling and materials required to create set ups on machine tools such as milling machines, grinders, lathes, and drilling ...

's trade, but early manifested a taste for

mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

, and entered

Harvard Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

in 1816, from where he graduated 1820. He then opened a school in Boston. In April 1823 he became superintendent of the

Boston Manufacturing Company The Boston Manufacturing Company was a business that operated one of the first factories in America. It was organized in 1813 by Francis Cabot Lowell, a wealthy Boston merchant, in partnership with a group of investors later known as The Boston As ...

at Waltham, Massachusetts, and in August 1824 of the Merrimack Manufacturing Company at Lowell. In these capacities, he invented important improvements in machinery. In the Fall of 1825, he delivered a course of lectures on the natural history of animals, illustrated with the

magic lantern The magic lantern, also known by its Latin name , is an early type of image projector that used pictures—paintings, prints, or photographs—on transparent plates (usually made of glass), one or more lenses, and a light source. Because a sin ...

. This he followed in later years with further popular lectures on light, the eye, the seasons, electricity, hydraulics, astronomy, commerce, etc. These lectures continued through many years. He was also superintendent of schools at Lowell, was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1827, and was for several years an examiner in mathematics at Harvard.

Arithmetic book

His reputation rests largely on his ''First Lessons in Intellectual Arithmetic'' (Boston, 1821), the plan of which he had carefully completed while yet an undergraduate at Harvard, where he was impressed by the necessity of such a work. He was accustomed to say that “the pupils who were under his tuition made his arithmetic for him,” that the questions they asked, and the necessary answers and explanations which he gave in reply, were embodied in the book. No other elementary work on arithmetic ever had such a sale. It had a large world-wide circulation, and was translated, not only into most of the languages of Europe, but also into several of the eastern tongues. He also published a “Sequel” to his arithmetic (1824; revised ed., 1833), and an “Algebra” (1827).

Legacy

The Colburn School in Lowell is named after him.

Notes

References

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External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Colburn, Warren 1793 births 1833 deaths Lecturers Businesspeople from Dedham, Massachusetts Educators from Dedham, Massachusetts American non-fiction writers Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Harvard University alumni 19th-century American mathematicians People from Lowell, Massachusetts 19th-century American businesspeople 19th-century American educators