Up for auction a  RARE! "Harvard President" Charles W. Eliot Hand Clipped Signature. This item is

certified authentic by Todd Mueller Autographs and comes with their Certificate

of Authenticity.

 ES-3149

Charles William Eliot (March 20, 1834 –

August 22, 1926) was an American academic who was selected as Harvard's president in

1869. A member of the prominent Eliot family of Boston, he

transformed the provincial college into the pre-eminent American research

university.

Eliot served until 1909, having the longest term as president in the

university's history. Charles Eliot was a scion of the wealthy Eliot family of Boston. He was the son of politician Samuel

Atkins Eliot and his wife Mary (née

Lyman) and was the grandson of banker Samuel Eliot. He was one of five

siblings and the only boy. Eliot graduated from Boston Latin

School in

1849 and from Harvard

University in

1853. He was later made an honorary member of the Hasty

Pudding.

Although he had high expectations and obvious scientific talents, the first

fifteen years of Eliot's career were less than auspicious. He was appointed

Tutor in Mathematics at Harvard in the fall of 1854, and studied chemistry

with Josiah P. Cooke. In 1858, he was promoted to Assistant Professor

of Mathematics and Chemistry. He taught competently, wrote some technical

pieces on chemical impurities in industrial metals,

and busied himself with schemes for the reform of Harvard's Lawrence

Scientific School. But his real goal, appointment to the Rumford

Professorship of Chemistry, eluded him. This was a particularly bitter blow

because of a change in his family's economic circumstances—the financial

failure of his father, Samuel

Atkins Eliot,

in the Panic of 1857. Eliot had to face the

fact that "he had nothing to look to but his teacher's salary and a legacy

left to him by his grandfather Lyman." After a bitter struggle over the

Rumford chair, Eliot left Harvard in 1863. His friends assumed that he would

"be obliged to cut chemistry and go into business in order to earn a

livelihood for his family." But instead, he used his grandfather's legacy and a small

borrowed sum to spend the next two years studying the educational systems of

the Old World in Europe.

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