EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was originally published by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.
Edwin Lincoln Moseley (1865–1948) represents what people once referred to as a “gentleman scientist” — a researcher working independently of university affiliation, self-financed and motivated by his own curiosity.
In the late 19th century, science was becoming increasingly specialized, but Moseley remained a generalist, primarily concerned with botany, ornithology, dendrology, and other life sciences.
The majority of his career was spent teaching at the high school level. His highest degree was not a Ph.D., but a Master of Arts. Nevertheless, Moseley is a giant of Ohio science.
Although not a geologist, he applied geological principles to investigating how the Sandusky Bay area evolved during and after the most recent Ice Age and made important contributions to our understanding of that area’s Holocene history.
Moseley was born in 1865 in Union City, Michigan. From a young age he showed a keen interest in mathematics and the natural sciences, and he graduated as the youngest in his high school class at age 15.
He had to wait a year to become old enough to enroll at the University of Michigan, but once there he obtained a Master of Arts degree after four years. Once again he was the youngest in his graduating class, having paid his way through school by selling woodworked goods of his own making.
Moseley briefly taught high school science and mathematics in Grand Rapids, Michigan, but resigned to take part in an ornithological and scientific expedition.
He and several companions spent months travelling in the Philippines, China, and Japan where they discovered 50 new species of birds and mammals, including Actenoides lindsayi moseleyi, a kingfisher named for Moseley.
Returning to the Great Lakes area, Moseley took a job teaching science at Sandusky High School in 1889.
He would remain there for 25 years, earning a reputation as an eccentric, much-loved, but also quite demanding, instructor.
A believer in an active, observation-based mode of learning, he was known for leading his classes on frequent, wide-ranging field trips that might run from before dawn until after dark and would touch on geology, botany, ornithology, biology, and other sciences all in a single outing.
At the high school, he opened a natural history museum using donated materials and specimens from his own collection: minerals, fossils, plants, taxidermized mammals and birds, and live snakes and amphibians.
The collection eventually grew to 17,000 items and attracted thousands of visitors. The museum and his field trips earned him widespread renown in the Sandusky area.
Having spent time talking to renowned geologists G. K. Gilbert and Frank E. Leverett, Moseley became interested in the geomorphology of the lands around Sandusky — that is, the geological processes that contributed to the landscape’s present-day form.
Convinced the lands had undergone profound changes in the geologically recent past, he set out to find evidence by mapping the bathymetry (depth contours) of Sandusky Bay.
During winters from 1901 to 1904, he and some of his students spent weekends on the frozen surface of the bay, boring through the ice and probing down through the water to gauge the depth of the firm clay below the bay’s mucky bottom. (As Moseley dryly remarked in his published results)
On one occasion a boat was taken along on the ice, at another time a life preserver. Both proved useful.
By this means he and his students discovered channels cut into the clay below the bay, which could have only occurred if Lake Erie had once been lower than the bay itself.
Moseley found that these natural channels join to form one large channel, which deepens as it passes Sandusky and exits the bay into Lake Erie.
Following this discovery, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dredged this large channel, finding it to be up to 25 feet deep, enabling huge freighter ships to safely access Sandusky Harbor.
Following the efforts of Sandusky residents, this channel was later named the Moseley Channel.
Moseley later expanded the mapping project, probing and boring into the marshes between Sandusky and Huron, where he noted not only the depth of firm clay but also the nature of the materials penetrated, demonstrating a sedimentologist’s sense for the environmental conditions they represented.
Working inland towards Fremont, he queried farmers about the depths of their water wells — a method of mapping bedrock topography that still is used today — and discovered the existence of buried river channels farther inland.
Moseley also enlisted students to help study the sand dunes at Cedar Point. At that time, much of the Cedar Point sand spit was still undeveloped.
Moseley recognized that the dunes represented storm deposits that were hundreds of years old.
To trees growing on the dunes, he applied the principles of dendrochronology — studying the number and thickness of tree rings — to arrive at an estimated date of formation for each of the eight dune ridges.
He found the oldest dated to about 1429.
This enabled him to indirectly estimate how much Lake Erie had risen over the past several centuries and how it would continue to rise. Geologists now understand this gradual rise is caused by isostatic rebound, a process of adjustment that the land surface and subsurface undergo for millennia after Ice Age glaciers recede from an area.
Overall, Moseley’s work allowed him to create a coherent narrative for the evolution of the geomorphology of the Sandusky Bay area, explaining the formation of the bay, Cedar Point, and other natural features, all without a degree in geology.
His observations, measurements, and interviews of local residents are a valuable historical record to anyone studying the geomorphology of the region.
In 1914, after 25 years of teaching high school at Sandusky, he left to become a professor at Bowling Green Normal School (now Bowling Green State University), where he would teach for another 22 years.
Moseley’s most-focused studies in geology took place earlier in his professional career from 1894 to 1905.
Late in life, he returned to earth science with a study of dendrochronology and rainfall records, identifying a 90.4-year-long tree ring cycle that he claimed arose from sunspot activity and could be used to predict future precipitation and lake levels.
In the decades after his death, lake level trends in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s appeared to bear out his predictions.
Moseley retired from teaching at Bowling Green in 1936. He was recognized in Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
for 48 years of teaching without missing a single class. That record becomes even longer if his years as a student are included — he reportedly never missed a day after age 11.
Over his career, Moseley published about 98 articles and books on a variety of topics including astronomy; botany; geology; health, hygiene, and medical science; climatology; ornithology; zoology; and others.
Bowling Green awarded him a Doctorate in Humane Letters in 1943.
He died in 1948 at the age of 92. Decades of frugal bachelorhood had left him with a sizeable estate, which in his will he left to the university to fund scholarships.
The E. L. Moseley Scholarship is still offered by the university today.