David Starr Jordan was born on an apple orchard in upstate New York in 1851. As a boy he was fascinated by the stars and curious about the name and significance of the celestial bodies. When he was about eight, he got an atlas of astronomical charts and began comparing what he saw on the page to what he saw above his head. In five years he got his curiosity satisfied.
He then turned to the terrestrial. In between the chores his parents assigned him to do, and with the help of his big brother Rufus, he drew maps of his family's orchard, his walk to school, then copied charts of distant townships, states, countries, continents, all the way to every corner of the globe his hungry little fingers could crawl over.
Such eagerness worried his mother. One day she threw away piles of his son's creased, sweat stained maps and told him to find something “more relevant” to do with his time.
He obeyed and stopped making maps, but picked up the habit of picking wild flowers and plants he saw in his countryside surroundings to learn their names and locations in the biological map.
After graduating from Cornell University with both a Bachelor's degree in Science and a Master's in Botany in three years, he landed a job in Illinois teaching science at a small Christian university. But after attending a summer camp in Penikese Island, Massachusetts, organized by then famous naturalist Louis Agassiz to train young scholars for explorative collection of marine and botanical life, he decided to set his sights on the water. “The literature of Ichthyology (study of fishes) was inexact and incomplete,” he wrote, “with few comparative studies, so that the field seemed wide open, as indeed it was.”
As he jumped from teaching job to teaching job at schools all over the Midwest, he set himself the goal of discovering every freshwater fish in North America, while taking a job from the US Census Bureau
in 1880
to catalog the fish species that lived along the Pacific coast.
He then journeyed back to Bloomington, Indiana, where he had finally secured a permanent job as a professor of science at Indiana University. Six years later, when he was 34, the board of trustees asked him to become president of the institution. He accepted, making him the youngest university president in the entire country.
He now led a crew of burly, bespectacled taxonomists discovering fish faster than they could name them. They were preserving them in jars of ethanol and stacking them on shelves inside David’s secluded lab on the top floor of the science building. Thousands of mysterious creatures being piled higher and higher, awaiting their sacred naming ceremony.
Late one night in July of 1883, the lab caught fire. Jars exploded, fish vaporized, every last specimen was destroyed, and more: a secret document that David had been working for years, that mapped the connections of never-before-seen branches of tree of life, completely torched. “The flames of an hour had near undone his life work,” a reporter wrote on the local newspaper.
But David refused to be stalled by the catastrophe. He dusted up the ashes, and headed right back out to the nation’s bodies of water to retrieve what he had lost. He claimed to have learned only one lesson from the whole ordeal: “To publish at once,” he wrote.
Just two years later, another disaster struck. His wife, Susan, came down with a cough. Days later, she was dead. Killed, as their daughter Edith explains, by a bout of pneumonia the “rural town doctors were unable to cure.”
Again, David moved quickly. He held a simple but ceremonial funeral and then, as he had with the fish, headed right back out to the nation’s wilds, to retrieve what he had lost. Less than two years after Susan’s death, he had caught himself a new wife. A college sophomore named Jessie Knight, who's youthful, energetic, and enjoy traveling with him.
In time, a wealthy California couple heard about David—this cheerful, swashbuckling giant with hundreds of notches of scientific discovery on his belt. Their names were Leland and Jane Stanford, and one day in 1890, they traveled all the way to Bloomington to ask if he would become the first president of their little academic experiment in the farmlands of Palo Alto.
In 1891, he was sworn in as the founding president of Stanford University. He had just turned forty years old.
He immediately built a shiny new marine research facility on the tip of the Monterey Peninsula, the Hopkins Seaside Laboratory, modeled after Agassiz’s summer camp on Penikese Island.
Unhindered by financial constraints, at Stanford David commissioned fish-collecting expeditions to the places he had only been able to dream of, and map, as a boy. To Samoa he went, and to Russia, Cuba, Hawaii, Albania, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Switzerland, Greece, and beyond. Overall they collected and gave names to around one thousand new fish species, and many more piling higher and higher inside the lab at Stanford.
And then at 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906, the San Francisco earthquake struck. In just forty-seven seconds, decades of David's work got eliminated. Eels severed by shelves. Blowfish popped by shards of glass. For many of those specimens left intact, hundreds of them, nearly a thousand, their holy name tags had scattered all over the laboratory floor, his meticulously named fish had become an amorphous unknown again.
So what did David do?
To prevent the piles of fish from decaying, he had his crew water-hose them day and night before the ethanol he ordered arrived.
Then he sorted out the fish he could recognize, and sewed their name tag directly to their body. To its throat. To its tail. To its eyeball. So they would never get separated again.
David served Stanford as president until 1913 and then chancellor until his retirement in 1916. He died at his home on the Stanford campus after suffering a series of strokes over two years on September 19, 1931.
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