Archive of Charles Colt Yates, Engineer and Captain with the US Coast & Geodetic Survey in the US, Europe, and the Philippines, 1870s1940s

Charles Colt Yates (1868–1944) was born in Binghamton, New York. He received a BS in Physics and an MS in Civil Engineering from the Case School of Applied Science (now Case Western Reserve University) before joining the US Coast and Geodetic Survey in 1892. Yates’ work with the USC&GS took him around the US and abroad; his work included observing the earth’s surface density in Hawaii; surveying Lake Pontchartrain, the Alaska–Yukon border, and the Aleutian Islands; surveying and ship-building in the Philippines and Hong Kong; and surveying the oyster bars in Maryland and Delaware. Offered here is a large collection of photographic and written material belonging to Yates. The photographs are almost entirely family shots. Subjects are generally identified verso by their initials, and include Yates; his grandparents, James Dennison Colt and Abigail Weber; his parents, Walter Lloyd Yates and Charlotte Colt; and especially his brother Alonzo Colt Yates, sister-in-law Elizabeth Deming, and their children Evelyn and Lloyd Deming Yates. The written material relates to Yates’ work and includes incoming correspondence, particularly work assignments sent by the Survey’s various superintendents; Yates’ drafts of outgoing correspondence; field expense forms—providing a look at the more quotidian activities of the Survey’s researchers—and departmental circulars; resumes and applications; notes and article drafts; and newspaper clippings. The latter generally relate to either the 1916 controversy around Woodrow Wilson’s scientific appointments, particularly of E. Lester Jones, or to the 1916 and 1928 Merchant Marine Acts. The merchant marine issue preoccupied Yates as several of his letters and articles concern the subject; other of his articles are an 1898 "Report on the Establishment of a Self Registering Tide Gauge at Morehead City, N.C" and a 1914 report on oceanography. Early in his career, Yates apparently wanted out of the Survey, writing to several different people seeking a teaching position and explaining that his "desire to become a teacher, and ultimately a professor, is so great, that I am willing to make a considerable sacrifice" in terms of pay (July 16, 1896). Of course, there would have been upsides to leaving the Survey, as working conditions at the time were far from ritzy; for instance, fellow officer Alex S. Christie wrote of the employee at the Sandy Hook tidal station in New Jersey: "Where now located, on the west side of this sand spit, the observer is completely isolated and threatens to resign. He has no love for nature, and no resources within himself. I could be very happy there." (July 26, 1892) Similarly, Superintendent William Ward Duffield attempted to convince Yates that the conditions on the Alaska-Yukon boundary survey were more tolerable than he might think: "It might pertinently be added here that the American Transportation and Trading Company has a number of stations on the Yukon and carries a large stock of goods including drugs, etc. at points near the boundary. The country is better supplied with means of existence and communication than was supposed sometime ago." (February 29, 1896) As references for a teaching position, Yates offered his Case classmate and highly decorated electrical engineer Comfort Avery Adams, then at Harvard, and Case president Cady Staley. Yates corresponded occasionally with Staley, including helping him with research by, among other things, giving him honest advice on the use of a theodolite: "From a personal experience: to approach a Vertical Circle without ever having seen one and having had it explained by a textbook is not only awkward but a[n] embarrassing experience and perhaps even a disastrous experience when the proper approach of the level correction is reached." (February 24, 1897) Another Case affiliate with whom Yates corresponded was Albert A. Michelson, then at the University of Chicago. Michelson is best known for the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment, a test.…