Owen Gingerich, 1930–2023

Abstract

We regret to inform our readers of the death of Owen Gingerich, the distinguished astronomer and historian of astronomy, on May 28, 2023. Owen was a long-standing member of the Journal’s editorial team and he served as reviews editor for more than three decades (1973–2007). Owen was professor emeritus of astronomy and of the history of science at Harvard University and an astronomer emeritus at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Owen was born in Washington, Iowa, to Verna Roth-Gingerich and Melvin Gingerich, members of Mennonite communities. Owen’s father was a high school teacher, who completed a Ph.D. in history when Owen was about 8 years old. After a period of insecurity and frequent moves, his father landed at job at Bethel College, a Mennonite institution in North Newton, Kansas. There Owen attended the first 3 years of high school, where he developed an interest in journalism and had an inspiring chemistry teacher. In 1947, before Owen’s senior year, his father moved to a new job at Goshen College, another Mennonite liberal arts college in Goshen, Indiana. In an unusual arrangement, even for the time, Owen skipped his last year of high school and matriculated at Goshen College. As Owen said in a 2005 oral history interview with David DeVorkin, “I skipped my senior year and did not graduate from high school until a year ago [i.e., 2004], when I was finally given an honorary degree by the Newton, Kansas School Board.”1 When he was about nine, his father helped him build a telescope from a mailing tube and purchased lenses. And his father’s interest in photography gave him the chance to learn some darkroom work. In high school, Owen built a more serious telescope, for which he ground his own mirror. He used this for a few years with a cardboard tube but then moved over to an open framework (Figure 1). In his junior year of college he wrote an article about telescope construction for a Mennonite weekly aimed at young people.2 At Goshen College, Owen majored in chemistry but continued also to pursue his interest in journalism, becoming editor of the student newspaper. Upon joining the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO), headquartered at the Harvard College Observatory, Gingerich wrote Harlow Shapley, HCO Director and one of America’s best known astronomers, to ask whether he might work as a summer intern at the Observatory. Shapley, also from the Midwest and with a strong journalistic background, agreed and Owen spent the summer of 1948 at Shapley’s beck and call, fetching plates3 and breathing the astronomical air in Cambridge. The following summer he returned, this time to a job at Sky & Telescope, housed at the HCO and formed in 1941 by the merger of The Sky and The Telescope. These experiences seem to have won him for astronomy—for he had previously had no idea that one could make money at astronomy as an undergraduate. His connection with Sky & Telescope proved to be 1195409 JHA0010.1177/00218286231195409Journal for the History of Astronomy obituary2023