105 Facts About William Beebe

Charles William Beebe was an American naturalist, ornithologist, marine biologist, entomologist, explorer, and author.

William Beebe is remembered for the numerous expeditions he conducted for the New York Zoological Society, his deep dives in the Bathysphere, and his prolific scientific writing for academic and popular audiences.

William Beebe quickly distinguished himself in his work for the zoo, first with his skill in designing habitats for its bird population, and soon with a series of research expeditions of increasing length, including an expedition around the world to document the world's pheasants.

William Beebe is regarded as one of the founders of the field of ecology, as well as one of the early 20th century's major advocates of conservation.

William Beebe is remembered for several theories he proposed about avian evolution which are now regarded as having been ahead of their time, particularly his 1915 hypothesis that the evolution of bird flight passed through a four-winged or "Tetrapteryx" stage, which has been supported by the 2003 discovery of Microraptor gui.

Charles William Beebe was born in Brooklyn, New York, son of the newspaper executive Charles Beebe.

The American Museum of Natural History, which opened the year that William Beebe was born, fostered William Beebe's love of nature and was an early influence on him.

In September 1891, William Beebe began attending East Orange High School.

In 1896, William Beebe was accepted with advanced placement to Columbia University.

William Beebe never applied to receive a degree from Columbia, although years later he was granted honorary doctorates from both Tufts and Colgate University.

In November 1897, Frank Chapman sponsored William Beebe to become an associate member of the American Ornithologists' Union, and the following month William Beebe gave his first professional lecture on ornithology to a society called Uncle Clarence's Bergen Point Culture Club.

William Beebe placed much importance on the birds being given as much space as possible, and proposed the building of a "flying cage" the size of a football field.

In 1901, William Beebe returned to Nova Scotia on his first expedition for the zoo, intending to collect marine animals by searching tide pools and with additional dredging.

William Beebe then went on to serve as an honorary curator from 1919 to 1962.

William Beebe's first book, titled Two Bird Lovers in Mexico, was an account of this expedition.

In 1906 William Beebe presented his own collection, which had grown to 990 specimens during his earlier years as a collector, as a gift to the zoo for educational and research purposes.

In 1907, the journal Zoologica was founded by Osborn and Hornaday specifically as a place for William Beebe to publish his research.

At this point in his life, William Beebe was forming a close friendship with then-president Theodore Roosevelt, which would last until Roosevelt's death in 1919.

William Beebe admired Roosevelt's skill as a field naturalist as well as his advocacy of conservation, and Roosevelt's fame made his support highly valuable in William Beebe's scientific endeavors.

Roosevelt in turn admired William Beebe's writing and his respect for the natural world.

William Beebe made extensive documentation of hoatzin behavior through field glasses, but their plans to capture one were foiled when they had to return home early due to Blair breaking her wrist.

William Beebe summarized this expedition in his book Our Search for a Wilderness, which was enthusiastically well-reviewed.

In December 1909, businessman and philanthropist Anthony R Kuser proposed to the zoo that Beebe be allowed to go on a voyage around the world to document the world's pheasants, which would be financed by Kuser.

The next ship took them to Singapore, where William Beebe established a base of operations for the next stage of his expedition.

In Burma William Beebe succumbed temporarily to a bout of depression, and it was several days before he was able to resume working or continue the expedition.

William Beebe attributed his recovery to the pile of penny dreadful novels he discovered in his bungalow at Pungatong, which he then read constantly for the next few days.

The last portion of William Beebe's journey took him to China, from which they made an unplanned visit to Japan to escape a riot as well as a surge of bubonic plague.

In Japan, William Beebe was given two cranes by the Imperial Household in exchange for a pair of swans, which were unknown in Japan.

William Beebe's expedition was completed after a total of 17 months, Beebe and Blair crossed the Pacific to San Francisco, then crossed the United States to return to their home in New York.

The publisher which William Beebe chose for his work was George Witherby and Sons of London, as a result of their success publishing the artwork of John James Audubon.

William Beebe undertook an expedition to Brazil in 1915, to capture more birds for the zoo.

In 1916, William Beebe traveled to Georgetown in pursuit of his earlier goal of establishing a permanent field research station in Guiana.

William Beebe summarized his discoveries at Kalacoon in his 1917 book Tropical Wild Life in British Guiana, which inspired many other researchers to plan trips to Kalacoon or to establish their own field research stations of the type that William Beebe had pioneered.

William Beebe was eager to serve in World War I, but at 40 he was considered too old for regular service.

In October 1917, William Beebe had his opportunity to serve in the war.

William Beebe spent time in trenches and accompanied a Canadian Indian platoon on a night raid.

William Beebe subsequently wrote several articles describing his war experience for Scribner's Magazine and Atlantic Monthly.

William Beebe was enthusiastic about the new station, and it proved very successful for conducting the same detailed analyses of wildlife within small areas that had been performed at Kalacoon.

At Kartabo William Beebe discovered the phenomenon known as an ant mill, a column of ants following itself in an endless loop until nearly all of them died of exhaustion.

William Beebe was eager to undertake an expedition to the Galapagos Islands, intending to obtain more detailed data in support of evolution than Charles Darwin had been able to collect in his earlier visit.

In 1923, Harrison Williams agreed to finance such an expedition, and Beebe was provided with a 250-foot steam yacht called the Noma for this purpose along with a support crew.

The support crew included several scientists who had worked with Beebe previously and several artists including the marine painter Harry Hoffman, as well as some of Williams' friends whose inclusion was a condition for Williams' agreement to fund the expedition.

William Beebe discovered a previously unknown bay on Genovesa Island in the Galapagos, which he named Darwin Bay, and documented the diversity of animal life that inhabited it.

The book in which William Beebe summarized this expedition, titled Galapagos: World's End, was an instant best-seller and remained on the New York Times top ten list for several months.

In 1924, William Beebe went on another expedition to his Guiana research station of Kartabo, intending to continue the detailed documentation of the tropical ecosystem that he had begun at Kalacoon.

In 1925, Beebe set out on a second Galapagos expedition, The Arcturus Oceanographic Expedition, backed by Williams and several other donors.

The Arcturus did not encounter the thick mats of sargassum in the Sargasso Sea that William Beebe was hoping to study, but William Beebe and his crew experienced great success dredging creatures from the sea off the coast of Saint Martin and Saba.

William Beebe sailed along the border between the currents for several days to document it, theorizing that it could be the cause of the unusual climate which South America had recently been experiencing.

William Beebe continued to perform helmet dives throughout his Galapagos expedition, documenting several previously unknown sea animals.

In 1927, William Beebe went on an expedition to Haiti to document its marine life.

William Beebe provided an account of this expedition in his 1928 book Beneath Tropic Seas, which was the first of his books to receive less than enthusiastic reviews, due to its episodic structure.

William Beebe later went so far as to suggest that beachfront homes would someday contain their own underwater gardens, to be experienced with the help of diving helmets:.

William Beebe disliked the heat of the tropics and was unwilling to go with Beebe to Kartabo.

William Beebe compared the knowledge that could be gained of the deep ocean from dredging to what a visitor from Mars could learn about a fog-shrouded earthly city by using a dredge to pick up bits of debris from a street.

William Beebe began planning to create an underwater exploration device, which he could use to descend into the depths and observe these environments directly.

In return, William Beebe would pay for other expenses such as chartering a ship to raise and lower the sphere, and as the owner of the sphere, Barton would accompany William Beebe on his expeditions in it.

William Beebe named their vessel the Bathysphere, from the Greek prefix bathy- meaning "deep" combined with "sphere".

William Beebe's observations were relayed up the phone line to be recorded by Gloria Hollister, his chief technical associate who was in charge of preparing specimens obtained from dredging.

Barton was often resentful of this, believing William Beebe to be deliberately hogging the fame.

William Beebe in turn lacked patience for Barton's unpredictable moods and felt that Barton did not display the proper respect for the natural world.

Likely, William Beebe became romantically involved with Hollister during his work at Nonsuch Island.

William Beebe continued to conduct marine research after 1934, but he felt that he had seen what he wanted to see using the Bathysphere and that further drives were too expensive for whatever knowledge he gained from them to be worth the cost.

Shortly after returning, William Beebe set out on a longer expedition to the waters around Baja California, financed by the Californian businessman Templeton Crocker on board his yacht the Zaca.

In 1937 William Beebe went on a second expedition aboard the Zaca, documenting the native wildlife along the Pacific Coast from Mexico to Colombia.

Transportation to and from Bermuda resumed in 1940, and William Beebe returned there in May 1941, but the environment was slowly being transformed due to the war.

Appalled by the destruction, William Beebe finally rented his station at Nonsuch Island to a military contractor and returned to New York.

Meanwhile, William Beebe began searching for a new tropical research station to replace Kartabo, which had fallen victim to deforestation just like Kalacoon before it.

William Beebe eventually helped Elswyth purchase a small farm near Wilmington, Vermont, where he visited her frequently.

William Beebe's immobility presented him with the opportunity to spend hours at a time observing a pair of bat falcons through binoculars, documenting the behavior of their two chicks and every prey item fed to them by their parents.

William Beebe's observations documented several behaviors which were new to science, including the first documented example of play in birds.

William Beebe returned to Rancho Grande in 1948, where he completed several technical papers about the migration patterns of birds and insects, as well as a comprehensive study of the area's ecology which he coauthored with Jocelyn Crane.

Finally, when the 1948 Venezuelan coup d'etat installed Marcos Perez Jimenez as Venezuela's dictator, William Beebe decided that he could no longer continue to work in Venezuela.

William Beebe described his experiences at Rancho Grande in his 1949 book High Jungle, which was the last of William Beebe's major books.

William Beebe was by this point the only remaining member of the zoo's original staff, and had produced more scholarly papers and publicity than any other employee.

Letters and testimonials poured in from other scientists with whom William Beebe had worked, attesting to their admiration of him and his influence on them.

In 1949, William Beebe bought this estate to use a permanent research station to replace Rancho Grande.

William Beebe renamed the estate Simla, after the hill in India that featured in Rudyard Kipling's writings.

William Beebe later described the sense of destiny that marked his introduction to the estate:.

In 1953, William Beebe donated both properties to the New York Zoological Society for one dollar, giving him the position of one of the society's "Benefactors in Perpetuity".

In 1952, on his seventy-fifth birthday, William Beebe retired from his position as the director of the NYZS's Department of Zoological Society and became Director Emeritus, while Jocelyn Crane was promoted to Assistant Director.

In honor of his lifetime of work as a naturalist, William Beebe was awarded the Theodore Roosevelt Distinguished Service Medal in 1953.

Snow became a regular visitor to Simla, and in return William Beebe provided financial assistance for some of Snow's own research.

William Beebe devised an unusual method for determining how he would react to his visitors at Simla.

William Beebe was reluctant to accept speaking engagements because of the effect this had on his voice, although he continued to give lectures on occasion with Jocelyn's help.

Hill provides a differing account, stating that William Beebe remained lucid and able to move about without assistance almost until his last day, apart from the periods of time during which his "mango mouth" temporarily slurred his speech.

William Beebe died of pneumonia at Simla on June 4,1962.

William Beebe had frequently worried that Elswyth would write a biography of him after his death.

William Beebe was more famous in the United States than any other American naturalist before the days of television.

William Beebe was a well-known figure in the Roaring Twenties of New York City and was friends with numerous other well-known figures of the period, including Fannie Hurst and the cartoonist Rube Goldberg.

William Beebe described his religious beliefs as a combination of Presbyterianism and Buddhism.

William Beebe's religion was largely the result of seeking to combine his sense of awe and wonder at the natural world with a scientific understanding of its workings.

William Beebe was highly critical of efforts to use science to justify political ideologies, such as socialism or the belief that women were inferior to men.

William Beebe disapproved of the eugenic ideas advocated by many biologists in the early 20th century, including some of his contemporaries at the zoo, although this was largely out of fear that these ideas would alienate friends of the zoo and cause divisions among its staff.

However, Hornaday never publicly expressed his disagreements with William Beebe and did not hesitate to defend William Beebe's work when others criticized it.

William Beebe had high expectations of the people working under him on all of his expeditions, although he never revealed the exact characteristics that he looked for in potential employees.

William Beebe nonetheless exhibited a high degree of loyalty to those employees who were capable of meeting his standards.

William Beebe was a pioneer in the field now known as ecology.

William Beebe was a pioneer in the field of oceanography, setting a precedent with his Bathysphere dives which many other researchers would follow.

However, William Beebe's prolific writing for a popular audience had a downside, in that other scientists of his time were reluctant to hold him in high accord because they regarded him as a popularizer.

William Beebe had a total of 64 animals named after him, and he described one new species of bird and 87 species of fish.

William Beebe based this theory on his observation that the hatchlings and embryos of some modern birds possess long quill feathers on their legs, which he regarded as an atavism; he noticed vestiges of leg-wings on one of the specimens of Archaeopteryx.

William Beebe described his idea in a 1915 paper published in Zoologica, titled "A Tetrapteryx Stage in the Ancestry of Birds".

Heilmann examined hatchlings of many other bird species, both closely related to those studied by William Beebe and belonging to more primitive species, in hope of finding additional evidence for the leg-wings which William Beebe had documented.

William Beebe continued to advance his Tetrapteryx hypothesis as late as the 1940s.

In 1974, William Beebe's property was donated to the newly established Asa Wright Nature Center.