William Stimpson

William Stimpson was an American scientist. He was interested particularly in marine biology. Stimpson became an important early contributor to the work of the Smithsonian Institution and later, director of the Chicago Academy of Sciences.

Biography

Stimpson was born in Boston, Massachusetts to Herbert Hathorne Stimpson and Mary Ann Devereau Brewer. The Stimpsons were of the colonial stock of Massachusetts, the earliest known member of the family being James Stimpson, who was married in 1661, in Milton. His mother died at an early age. William Stimpson's father was an ingenious inventor, and a leading merchant of Boston in the mid decades of the nineteenth century, trading as "H. & F. Stimpson, stoves and furnaces, corner of Congress and Water Streets. It was he who invented the "Stimpson range", the first sheet-iron cooking stove, famous in its day throughout New England. He also made improvements in rifles, and suggested the placing of the flange on the inside of railway car wheels instead of on the outside, as had been the custom. His son was to inherit his energy, love of social life, enthusiasm, and brilliant wit.
Stimpson's father moved from Roxbury and built a house in the village of Cambridge. When fourteen years of age he read with delight Edwin Swett's work on geology, and soon after this a copy of Augustus Addison Gould's filled him with exultant enthusiasm.
He graduated from the Cambridge high school in 1848, winning the gold medal, the highest prize of the school. In September 1848 he entered the Cambridge Latin School, absorbing the mastery he displayed in the use of Latin in the description of marine animals in his Prodromus of 1857–60.
He studied under the great naturalist Louis Agassiz. He focused most of his studies on marine biology, particularly invertebrates. At the age of twenty he was appointed naturalist on the U.S. North Pacific Exploring Expedition. Between 1853–1856 the expedition voyaged around the world and Stimpson became the first Western naturalist to collect in Japan. He then settled in Washington, D.C., where he founded the Megatherium Club at the Smithsonian Institution. The social gatherings of this group included many of the leading naturalists of the period. For two years during the Civil War many of them lived in the Smithsonian building. Although never a full-time employee of the institution, Stimpson founded the department of marine invertebrates at the Smithsonian. When fellow club member Robert Kennicott left his post as director of the Chicago Academy of Sciences in Chicago, Stimpson went to that city to take his place. When Kennicott died in Russian America in 1866, Stimpson chose to stay in Chicago out of loyalty to his friend and the Academy. In 1869 the Smithsonian sent its entire collection of marine invertebrates to the Academy, as Stimpson was working on a monographs of the marine invertebrates of America's East Coast. By 1871 the Academy possessed one of the most extensive natural history collections in the United States. The Academy's "fireproof" building was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. He is buried in an unmarked grave in Ellicott City, Maryland.
Stimpson is credited with naming 827 valid taxa of marine invertebrates from eleven different phyla. He is primarily known for his descriptions of crustaceans and mollusks. Ronald Scott Vasile, William Stimpson and the Golden Age of American Natural History, Northern Illinois University Press, 2018.

Species named for him

Rare Hawaiian Goby Fish Sicydium stimpsoni Gill, 1860
Eel Bathycongrus stimpsoni Fowler, 1934
Sun Starfish Solaster stimpsoni
Stimpson coastal shrimp Heptacarpus stimpsoni
Fossil - small aquatic arthropod Acanthotelson stimpsoni Meek & Worthen
Striped sunstar Solaster stimpsoni
Clam Mercenaria stimpsoni
Yellow Cone Conus stimpsoni Dall, 1902
Eyespot Rock Shrimp Sicyonia stimpsoni Bouvier, 1905
Nudibranch mollusc Coryphella stimpsoni
Gastropod Pteropurpura stimpsoni
Gastropod Turritellopsis stimpsoni
genus of flowering plants, ''Stimpsonia''