Professor Philip Rounseville Alger, United States Navy, for the last nine years Secretary and Treasurer of the Naval Institute and Editor of its Proceedings, died at Annapolis, Maryland, on February 23, 1912.
To those who had the privilege of intimate association with Professor Alger, the news of his death has brought a sense of irreparable personal loss. To them, the memory of what he was will always far transcend the memory of what he did and the thought of what he might have done if his life had been prolonged. He had, in a most unusual degree, the gift of making and retaining friends; a gift of which the secret lay partly in his singularly gracious and winning personality and partly in the perfect confidence which he inspired as to his own unwavering loyalty to those whom he admitted to his friendship.
To the wider circle of those who, without intimate acquaintance with the man himself, were familiar with his work, his death means the loss of an uplifting and stimulating force in all the activities of the service which he loved and to which he gave himself without reserve through a lifetime—all too short—of fruitful and unselfish labor.
Professor Alger is sometimes thought of, by those who know him only superficially, as essentially a mathematician and a theorist. To a certain extent this view seems justified by the ease with which he dealt with abstract subjects; but any estimate of him is misleading which fails to take account of the practical side of his remarkably versatile intellect.
The son of a New England poet and mystic, he added to the imagination which was his birthright, and which was doubtless the source of the almost unerring instinct with which he went to the heart of every problem which he attacked, a practical common sense which tempered his brilliant intellectuality and kept him loyal to facts as he found them. He was not more intellectually brilliant than he was intellectually honest; and he could abandon a cherished theory which proved untenable, with a wholehearted frankness which was in perfect keeping with the other traits of his modest and generous nature. His remarkable gift for abstract reasoning he regarded always as a means to an end, never as an end in itself; and he never considered any part of his work as finished until he had drawn from it every deduction of practical usefulness which it could be made to yield.
Professor Alger was born at Boston, September 29, 1859. He graduated at the Boston Latin School in 1876, and entered the Naval Academy the same year, graduating four years later at the head of his class. His first cruise, on the Richmond, took him to the Pacific Station and to China. Returning in 1882, he was ordered to the Bureau of Ordnance, where he entered thus early in his career upon the path in which he was to win such marked distinction in later years.
By what seems a remarkable coincidence, in view of his extraordinary fitness to meet the demands of the situation, his entrance upon ordnance duty coincided exactly with the beginning of the "New Navy," of steel ships and built-up guns. Coming from a cruise in a wooden corvette of the Civil War period, he was called upon at once to bear a part in the design of guns built up of tempered steel, for ships as strikingly in contrast with the Richmond as were these guns with the cast-iron muzzle-loading smoothbores with which that ship had fought her way past the batteries at New Orleans and Mobile Bay.
The new ships were the Chicago, Boston, Atlanta and Dolphin; cruisers it is true, and insignificant to-day, but up-to-date in their class when designed, and more heavily armed than any other ships of that day which could properly be compared with them; and, so far as ordnance was concerned, more nearly allied to the battleship of to-day than to the wooden frigates and corvettes which had preceded them.
A second tour of duty afloat, this time in the Pensacola on the European Station, from 1885 to 1888, was followed by another assignment to the Bureau of Ordnance, and, a year later (November, 1890), by transfer to the corps of Professors of Mathematics.
With his tenure of duty on shore assured, Professor Alger entered now upon a new phase of his career and for more than nine years was associated intimately, so far as ordnance was concerned, with every step of the remarkable advance which in that brief period carried warship design in the United States from the Chicago and Boston to the Maine and the Missouri.
In 1899 Professor Alger left the Bureau of Ordnance to take up the duties of Head of Department of Mechanics at the Naval Academy. In 1903 he was induced to accept the position of Secretary and Treasurer of the Naval Institute, a position which carried with it the editorship of the Institute's Proceedings; and the following year he resumed his connection with the Bureau of Ordnance by becoming a member of the Special Board on Naval Ordnance. This Board, created in 1004, was designed to act as an advisory board to the Bureau, in connection especially with experimental work in the development and test of ordnance material.
In spite of his connection with the Naval Institute and with the Special Board, he continued his duties at the Naval Academy until 1907, when his direct connection with the Academy was severed; and thereafter until his death he was enabled to give his uninterrupted attention to the Institute and the Special Board.
Professor Alger's career as an educator brought out in strong relief a phase of his many-sided nature which almost justifies the conviction that here was the sphere, out of the many in which he stood pre-eminent, in which he was fitted for the widest usefulness. This was his generous and sympathetic comprehension of youth—of its promise, its trials, and its aspirations. He felt that his work was but half done when he had given to his students the best that he had to give from his wealth of knowledge and experience. He aspired to touch them at other points and to make his influence count for as much in the development of character as in that of mind. To this end he welcomed all who sought him to the refined and cultured atmosphere of his home; and many a young man found in this atmosphere, at the most impressionable period of his life, just the influence that was needed for the creation of a powerful and lasting impulse toward high ideals.
From the first, Professor Alger's administration of the affairs of the Naval Institute was brilliantly successful; and this not less on the financial than on the literary and professional sides. He rapidly enlarged its publishing department, always with excellent judgment, and added largely to its membership, especially in scientific and engineering circles. His own contributions to the Proceedings were many and notable, his "Professional Notes," being especially valuable.
The high place which admittedly belongs to the Proceedings to-day is very largely due to the energy and judgment with which he carried forward and extended the work begun by his predecessors; and those who may come after him will long benefit by the powerful and well-directed impulse which he has given to the Institute's affairs.
Professor Alger's work in Ordnance has already been referred to in general terms. To describe it in detail would call for more space than is here available. Nor is such description needed. More than of any other one man, it is true of him, that the history of the development of naval ordnance in the United States during the last quarter century is a history of his work.
He wrote much on subjects connected with Ordnance and two of his books, "Exterior Ballistics" and "The Elastic Strength of Guns," have long been recognized as standard works upon the subjects with which they deal. Another book, on "Hydromechanics," was prepared for use at the Naval Academy, and has had a gratifying success as a text book at other institutions. He had planned, and partly outlined, before his health failed, a treatise on "Interior Ballistics," which would have been the crowning- work of his career. The subject had attracted him for many years and had so far taken shape in his mind that he hoped to push it rapidly to completion when once it was seriously begun.
The failure of this plan is not the smallest of the losses to the world, which are involved in his untimely death.
It is often said that no one is so important that his place cannot be filled. However true this may be, there are many who feel that it will be long before we see again combined those qualities of intellect, of character, and of spirituality, which made up the brilliant and loveable personality of Philip Rounseville Alger.