Personal and Academic History
Lyman James Briggs was born on a farm in Assyria, Michigan near Battle Creek, Michigan. He was the eldest of two brothers in a family that descended from Clement Briggs who arrived in America in 1621 on the Fortune, the first ship to follow the Mayflower. He grew up in an outdoor life with duties to attend such as would be found on an active farm in the late 19th century. He went to the Briggs School built by his grandfather and later was a teacher there.
Briggs entered Michigan Agricultural College (now Michigan State University) in East Lansing, Michigan, entering by examination at age 15. Michigan State was a Land Grant college, so courses were taught in agriculture and mechanical arts. He majored in agriculture, but by graduation time in 1893 his interests had moved on to mechanical engineering and physics. He next entered the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, completing a Masters Degree in physics in 1895. From there he entered Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland and began work on his PhD.
In 1896 Briggs married Katherine Cook whom he met as an undergraduate at Michigan Agricultural College. Lyman and Katherine Cook Briggs had two children, a boy, Albert (known as "Bertie") and a girl, Isabel. Albert died in infancy, and Isabel would eventually marry Clarence Myers and go on to generate the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator with her mother .
In 1896 he also joined the US Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. While in Washington, he also continued his research at Johns Hopkins under Henry Augustus Rowland. Although he spent time working with the newly discovered Roentgen Rays, he ultimately graduated in 1903 with a Ph.D. in agriculture with a dissertation On the absorption of water vapor and of certain salts in aqueous solution by quartz. He was also elected to the Cosmos Club the same year.
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