Henry Augustus Rowland (November 27, 1848 – April 16, 1901) was an American physicist and Johns Hopkins educator. Between 1899 and 1901 he served as the first president of the American Physical Society. He is remembered primarily for the high quality of the diffraction gratings he made and for the work he did with them on the solar spectrum. Early life, family and education Rowland was born in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, where his father Henry Augustus Rowland was a Presbyterian pastor. From an early age, the younger Rowland exhibited marked scientific tastes and spent his spare time in electrical and chemical experiments. He graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York in 1870. Career After college, Rowland worked for the Western New York railway, but he did not like the work. He became an instructor in natural science at the University of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio. He resigned in order to return to Troy as assistant professor of physics at Rensselaer. Rowland was considered one of the most brilliant American scientists of his day. However, initially his merits were not perceived in his own country. He was unable to secure the publication of many of his early scientific papers; but James Clerk Maxwell at once saw their excellence, and had them printed in Philosophical Magazine. When the managers of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, asked advice in Europe as to whom they should make their professor of physics, Rowland was overwhelmingly recommended as the best choice. In 1876, he became the first occupant of the chair of physics at Johns Hopkins University, a position which he retained until his death in Baltimore on April 16, 1901. In the interval between his selection to Johns Hopkins and the assumption of his duties there, he studied physics under Hermann von Helmholtz in Berlin (1875–76), and carried out a well-known research on the effect of an electrically charged body in motion, showing it to give rise to a magnetic field. After settling in Baltimore, Rowland focused on two important pieces of work. One was a redetermination of the ohm. For this he obtained a value which was substantially different from that ascertained by the committee of the British Association appointed for the purpose, but ultimately he had the satisfaction of seeing his own result accepted as the more correct of the two. The other was a new determination of the mechanical equivalent