William Coblentz - Family and Personal Life

Family and Personal Life

In his autobiography, From the Life of a Researcher (1951), William Coblentz described his typical day as long hours of laboratory research followed by evenings spent on data analysis and writing papers. This left little time for socializing, and so it is not unexpected that Coblentz was over 50 before ever marrying. He wed Catherine Emma Cate of Vermont on June 10, 1924, and it is said that they spent their honeymoon in Flagstaff, Arizona while Coblentz was at the Lowell Observatory measuring planetary temperatures. Catherine Cate Coblentz achieved success as a writer of children's book, worked for a time at the National Bureau of Standards, and was instrumental in raising money to build the Cleveland Park Neighborhood Library in Washington, DC.

William Coblentz reportedly was plagued by periods of poor health, but he lived nearly 90 years. He is buried in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, DC alongside his wife and an infant daughter.

Read more about this topic:  William Coblentz

Famous quotes containing the words family, personal and/or life:

    We all of us waited for him to die. The family sent him a cheque every month, and hoped he’d get on with it quietly, without too much vulgar fuss.
    John Osborne (b. 1929)

    The child realizes to every man his own earliest remembrance, and so supplies a defect in our education, or enables us to live over the unconscious history with a sympathy so tender as to be almost personal experience.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface of things. We think that that is which appears to be.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)