Charles Howard Hinton - Life

Life

Hinton taught at Cheltenham Ladies College while he studied at Balliol College, Oxford, where he obtained his B.A. in 1877. From 1880 to 1886, he taught at Uppingham School in Rutland, where Howard Candler, a friend of Edwin Abbott Abbott's, also taught. Hinton also received his M.A. from Oxford in 1886.

In 1877 Hinton married Mary Ellen, daughter of Mary Everest Boole and George Boole, the founder of mathematical logic. In 1885 he went through a marriage ceremony with Maud Wheldon, by whom he had had twin children. He was subsequently convicted of bigamy and spent three days in prison, losing his job at Uppingham. In 1886 he moved with Mary Ellen to Japan and later to Princeton University by 1893 as an instructor in mathematics.

In 1897, he designed a gunpowder-powered baseball pitching machine for the Princeton baseball team's batting practice.. The machine was versatile, capable of variable speeds with an adjustable breech size, and firing curve balls by the use of two rubber-coated steel fingers at the muzzle of the pitcher. He successfully introduced the machine to the University of Minnesota, where Hinton worked as an assistant professor until 1900, when he resigned to move to the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.

At the end of his life, Hinton worked as an examiner of chemical patents for the United States Patent Office. He died unexpectedly of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 30, 1907.