Charles Elwood Mendenhall was born on August 1, 1872, in Columbus, Ohio.^[1][2] He was the son of Susan Allen (née Marple) and Thomas Corwin Mendenhall.^[1][3] At the age of six to nine, he lived in Japan while his father taught at the University of Tokyo.^[3] There he became friends with John Morse, son of Edward S. Morse.^[3]

He received a Bachelor of Arts in 1894 from Rose Polytechnic in Terre Haute, Indiana.^[1][3] Starting in 1895, he studied under Henry Rowland at Johns Hopkins University and received a PhD in 1898.^[1][2][4] Under Rowland, he worked with Charles Greeley Abbot, head of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, and fellow student Frederick A. Saunders, a fellow PhD candidate, on a black-body radiation problem for his thesis.^[3]

After graduation from Rose Polytechnic in 1894, Mendenhall worked with George Putnam to make a transcontinental survey of the acceleration of gravity for the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey and taught physics for a year at the University of Pennsylvania.^[1][3] From 1898 to 1901, he taught at Williams College.^[1][3] In 1901, he succeeded fellow Hopkins graduate Robert W. Wood as assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.^[2][3] He became a full professor in 1905.^[1][3][2]

He worked on a 1909 U.S. Mint assay and performed research at the Nela Laboratory in Cleveland in 1913.^[3] He is known for inventing the V-wedge method in 1911.^[1] In 1917, Mendenhall was made a Major of the Science and Research Division of the U.S. Army Signal Corps.^[2][3] He worked closely with his friend Robert Andrews Millikan at the Signal Corps.^[3] After World War I in 1919, he transferred to the U.S. Department of State, succeeding Henry A. Bumstead.^[3] He served for six months as the scientific attaché at the U.S. Embassy in London.^[2][3] He was chairman of the physical science division of the National Research Council in 1919 and 1920.^[5]

Later career edit

He became the department chair at the University of Wisconsin in 1926.^[1][3] In his time at the University of Wisconsin, he had 35 doctoral students, including Nobel Prize winner John Hasbrouck Van Vleck and Leland John Haworth.^[1][6] He remained professor until his death in 1935.^[7]

He was the vice president of The Optical Society in 1921 and the president of the American Physical Society from 1923 to 1925.^[1][2][3] He was the vice president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1929.^[3]

Mendenhall married Dorothy M. Reed of Talcottville, New York on February 14, 1906. They met as students at Johns Hopkins.^[2][3] Together, they had four children, including Margaret, who died shortly after birth, Thomas Corwin Mendenhall and John Talcott Mendenhall.^[2][8]

He played the violin and was active in musical circles for much of his life.^[3]

Mendenhall died at a hospital in Madison, Wisconsin on August 18, 1935.^[1]

• Mendenhall was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1918.^[9]
• In 1935, he was appointed fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences^[10] and a member of the American Philosophical Society.^[11]
• The Charles Elwood Mendenhall Fellowship is an award given to graduate students working in experimental physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.^[7]