'The great God, who
maketh and doeth all things well.' But if you have not listened
to His voice, speaking in His yellow sunbeam; in His banded
rainbows and purple sunsets; in the violet flash of His lightning,
and in the war of ITis tempests; or in His white crystalline snow
with its blue shadows, and in His dark rivers congealed into
transparent highways, solid as the rock; neither would you meditate
on any crude thoughts that I might suggest." –part of his speech given at the University of Troy
Ogden Rood was born February 3rd 1831, in Danbury, Connecticut to Reverend Anson Rood and his wife, Alida. He was born in the year of the first bank robbery, and the first coal burning locomotive run. He graduated from Princeton in 1852 (in the midst of the civil war era), and went on to study at the Sheffield scientific school of Yale. He then went on to prepare himself for his physicist work by studying at the Universities of Munich and Berlin, where he also dabbled with oil painting. When he returned from his studies abroad in 1858, he was chosen to be a professor of chemistry and physics at Troy University in Troy, New York. He stayed at this position for about five years until 1863, when he moved on to be the chair of physics at Columbia College. Rood was a great American physicist who went on to make many contributions to both science and the art world. Ogden Rood died on November 12th, 1902. He had served thirty-eight years as faculty at Columbia university, and had been credited as being one of the people to make it the prestigious university it is today.
