Worcester Reed Warner (May 16, 1846 – June 25, 1929) was an American mechanical engineer, entrepreneur, manager, astronomer, and philanthropist. With Ambrose Swasey he cofounded the

Warner & Swasey Company The Warner & Swasey Company was an American manufacturer of machine tools, instruments, and special machinery. It operated as an independent business firm, based in Cleveland, from its founding in 1880 until its acquisition in 1980. It was f ...

Biography

Life and career

Warner was born near

Cummington, Massachusetts Cummington is a town in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 829 at the 2020 census, down from 872 at the 2010 census. It is part of the Springfield, Massachusetts Metropolitan Statistical Area. History Cummingto ...

.
p. 11
He met Swasey at the Exeter Machine Works. On the completion of their apprenticeship in 1870, both entered the employ of Pratt & Whitney in Hartford, Connecticut. In 1880 he co-founded a business to manufacture machines with Ambrose Swasey. The firm, Warner & Swasey, was initially located in

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

but soon moved to

Cleveland Cleveland ( ), officially the City of Cleveland, is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County. Located in the northeastern part of the state, it is situated along the southern shore of Lake Erie, across the U.S. ...

.
p. 19
Worcester Warner would design the 36-inch

refracting telescope A refracting telescope (also called a refractor) is a type of optical telescope that uses a lens as its objective to form an image (also referred to a dioptric telescope). The refracting telescope design was originally used in spyglasses and a ...

installed at Lick Observatory in 1888. He later built telescopes that were used in

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

and

Argentina Argentina (), officially the Argentine Republic ( es, link=no, República Argentina), is a country in the southern half of South America. Argentina covers an area of , making it the second-largest country in South America after Brazil, th ...

Further activities

Warner was a charter member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and from 1897 to 1898 he served as the 16th president of ASME. (Ambrose Swasey would later serve as the 23rd ASME president.) In 1900 the firm was incorporated as

.
p. 27
Warner served as president and chairman of the board, but retired in 1911. Both Warner and Ambrose Swasey also became trustees of the

Case School of Applied Science The Case School of Engineering is the engineering school at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. It traces its roots to the 1880 founding of the Case School of Applied Science. It became the Case Institute of Technology in 1947 ...

. As both men had an interest in astronomy, they donated an entire observatory to the school. This became the

Warner and Swasey Observatory The Warner and Swasey Observatory is the astronomical observatory of Case Western Reserve University. Named after Worcester R. Warner and Ambrose Swasey, who built it at the beginning of the 20th century, it was initially located on Taylor Road i ...

. It was dedicated in 1920. Worcester Reed Warner Gravesite

The Warner Building on Case Western Reserve University houses the Worcester Reed Warner Laboratory, named after the former university trustee. The construction of this building was partly funded by Worcester Warner. The crater Warner on the

Moon The Moon is Earth's only natural satellite. It is the fifth largest satellite in the Solar System and the largest and most massive relative to its parent planet, with a diameter about one-quarter that of Earth (comparable to the width of ...

is named after him.

Death

Warner died in

Eisenach Eisenach () is a town in Thuringia, Germany with 42,000 inhabitants, located west of Erfurt, southeast of Kassel and northeast of Frankfurt. It is the main urban centre of western Thuringia and bordering northeastern Hessian regions, situat ...

, Saxe-Weimar,

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

and is buried in

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Sleepy Hollow, New York, is the final resting place of numerous famous figures, including Washington Irving, whose 1820 short story " The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" is set in the adjacent burying ground at the Old Dutch ...

, Sleepy Hollow, New York.

Worcester Reed Warner Medal

The ''Worcester Reed Warner Medal'' is awarded by the ASME for "outstanding contribution to the permanent literature of engineering". It was established by bequest in 1930. Some of the recipients are: * 1933: Dexter S. Kimball * 1934:

Ralph Flanders Ralph Edward Flanders (September 28, 1880 – February 19, 1970) was an American mechanical engineer, industrialist and politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Vermont. He grew up on subsistence farms in Vermont and R ...

* 1935:

Stephen Timoshenko Stepan Prokofyevich Timoshenko (russian: Степан Прокофьевич Тимошенко, p=sʲtʲɪˈpan prɐˈkofʲjɪvʲɪtɕ tʲɪmɐˈʂɛnkə; uk, Степан Прокопович Тимошенко, Stepan Prokopovych Tymoshenko; ...

* 1943:

Igor Sikorsky Igor Ivanovich Sikorsky (russian: И́горь Ива́нович Сико́рский, p=ˈiɡərʲ ɪˈvanəvitʃ sʲɪˈkorskʲɪj, a=Ru-Igor Sikorsky.ogg, tr. ''Ígor' Ivánovich Sikórskiy''; May 25, 1889 – October 26, 1972)Fortie ...

* 1945:

Joseph M. Juran Joseph Moses Juran (December 24, 1904 – February 28, 2008) was a Romanian-born American engineer and management consultant. He was an evangelist for quality and quality management, having written several books on those subjects. He was the brot ...

* 1947: Arpad L. Nadai * 1949: Fred B. Seely * 1951: Jacob Pieter Den Hartog * 1954: Joseph Henry Keenan * 1956: James Keith Louden''The Gazette and Daily from York,'' Pennsylvania. December 7, 1956. p. 15 * 1957:

William Prager William Prager, (before 1940) Willy Prager, (May 23, 1903 in Karlsruhe – March 17, 1980 in Zurich) was a German-born US applied mathematician. In the field of mechanics he is well known for the Drucker–Prager yield criterion. Willy Prager st ...

* 1960: Lloyd H. Donnell * 1965:

Ascher H. Shapiro Ascher Herman Shapiro (May 20, 1916 – November 26, 2004) was a professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. He grew up in New York City. Early life and education Shapiro was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish Lithuanian immigrant ...

* 1967: Nicholas J. Hoff * 1969: Hans W. Liepmann * 1970:

Wilhelm Flügge Gottfried Wilhelm Flügge (March 18, 1904 – March 19, 1990) was a German engineer, and Professor of Applied Mechanics at Stanford University.J.J. O'Connor and E.F. Robertson.Gottfried Wilhelm Flügge" at ''history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk.'' School of ...

* 1971: Stephen H. Crandall * 1975: Philip G. Hodge, Jr. * 1979: Darle W. Dudley * 1980: Olgierd Zienkiewicz * 1984:

Yuan-Cheng Fung Yuan-Cheng "Bert" Fung (September 15, 1919 – December 15, 2019) was a Chinese-American bioengineer and writer. He is regarded as a founding figure of bioengineering, tissue engineering, and the "Founder of Modern Biomechanics". Biography Fung ...

* 1990: J. Tinsley Oden * 1992: J. N. Reddy * 1997: Zdenek P. Bazant * 1998: Thomas J. R. Hughes * 1999: Yogesh Jaluria * 2007: Portonovo Ayyaswamy * 2016: Isaac Elishakoff * 2017: Michael Paidoussis * 2018: Martin Ostoja-Starzewski * 2019: Arun Srinivasa * 2020: Marco Amabili

References

Bibliography

* . * . {{DEFAULTSORT:Warner, Worcester Reed 1846 births 1929 deaths People from Cummington, Massachusetts American mechanical engineers Machine tool builders Presidents of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers American astronomers Case Western Reserve University people Burials at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery