Edward Bowser: The Traveling Academic of Rutgers
Liam Smith
Edward Bowser is an example of a man who became a member of the New Brunswick and Rutgers family. Bowser was actually born in the province of New Brunswick, Canada. He moved many times as a young man, and while in New York wrote to Dr. David Murray, Rutgers College’s leading mathematician, about an equation. In the course of the correspondence, Bowser decided on attending Rutgers, with the encouragement of Dr. Murray. Bowser would be a part of the Rutgers family for the rest of his life.
Bowser was one of the first men to graduate from Rutgers with a Bachelor's Degree in Science in 1868, the same year that Elmwood Cemetery was founded. Bowser remained at Rutgers as a tutor, and, after a year-long stint working for the United States Coast Survey, became an adjunct professor at Rutgers in 1870, and became a full professor the following year.
Professor Bowser accepted New Brunswick as his home quite expediently. While he had never lived in New Jersey before coming to Rutgers, he accepted with great enthusiasm the position of Head Surveyor of the boundary of New Jersey and New York, working alongside Dr. Murray and Dr. Cook. Professor Bowser’s work in surveying was so respected that in 1885 Bowser was made the Acting Assistant of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey.
Professor Bowser was an international man in many ways. Not only had he been born in Canada and went to school in America but he enjoyed traveling greatly, both while he was a student and as an academic. Professor Bowser spent much of his time as a young man traveling North America, traveling throughout Canada, California, and even Mexico. Professor Bowser would write letters home during his trips, suggesting that he still wanted to stay connected to his local community. Most of his letters were published in the New Brunswick Daily Times, allowing his friends and neighbors to keep up with his travels and whereabouts.
Professor Bowser’s international trips were just as much about visiting friends and getting to experience sights he had thought about since he was a youth as they were vacations. For example, during his trip to Egypt, Professor Bowser wrote about his having long dreamed of visiting the Nile and Egypt. It is worth noting that the Western world had grown quite enthusiastic about Ancient Egypt after Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, and the first half of the 19th century had European archaeologists coming to rediscover old Egyptian sites. This led to a growth in the field of Egyptology, the study of Ancient Egypt, which included an increase in the publishing of books on the topic. Seeing as Professor Bowser quotes from several books on the topic in his letters, as well as researching the history of the places he visits, we can well assume that he has an understanding of Egyptology. It is not unlikely that Professor Bowser was one of many who got swept up in this renewed interest in Ancient Egypt that occurred while he was young, which may have led to his interest in Egypt, along with its presence in the Old Testament, which Professor Bowser also mentioned frequently in his letters.
In one humorous anecdote, mixing his knowledge of the Book of Exodus and his opinions as an educator, while visiting Heliopolis, where according to tradition Moses was educated, Professor Bowser humorously pondered if Moses was a great football player or performed in a college boat race, which he jokingly claimed was what college presidents were more interested in. His joke, while amusing, was also a subtle critique of how he thought that schools spent as much time extolling the virtues of college athletics as they did the academic and intellectual atmosphere of colleges. For Professor Bowser, clearly the Bible had some effect on his interest in traveling to Egypt. It certainly was an inspiration for his desire to travel to Syria and Palestine, which he said next to Egypt was a place he always wanted to visit most.
Professor Bowser also traveled to the 1900 Paris Exposition, and had many friends internationally, many of whom were also frequent travelers and whom he would meet on his journeys. Some were people he had met at Rutgers, such as Lewis Gaston Leary, who had graduated from Rutgers in 1899 and had since began teaching at American College in Beirut. Still, there were plenty of others who he had met who simply shared the same passion for world travel. These were the types of friends who would offer travel advice and who he spent time with while on vacation in places like Philae and Jamaica.
It is interesting to note that he had friends in Jamaica, New York, and Berlin try to dissuade Professor Bowser from traveling to Russia while on account of the Russo-Japanese War, the general social unrest that had been stirring as a result of the war and would eventually evolve into the Russian Revolution of 1905, and the series of pogroms going on throughout Russia from 1903-1906. The opinion of Russia in much of the West at that point was that Russia was a very unsafe country to be in. Professor Bowser did take their concerns into consideration, and wrote to Samuel Smith, U.S. Consul in Moscow, who reassured him that nothing would interfere with his trip. Those naysayers may have ended up being correct, as not long after Professor Bowser left Odessa and the Russian Empire, a pogrom would occur in the city, leaving hundreds dead.
In January of 1910, He had been traveling to Sydney, Australia, but after arriving there became ill. Finding out that surgery would be needed to save his life, he opted to go to Hawaii to be in the company of Capt. Joseph Castuer, a Rutgers graduate who was in Honolulu Hawaii. Knowing that the surgery was a risky proposition, he chose to have the Victorian idea of a “good death,” being with a friend as he passed. After he died, a memorial service was held in the Central Union Church, in Honolulu, attended by the Governor of Hawaii and his wife, the President and faculty of the College of Hawaii, as well as by many native teachers from the public schools.
Despite Professor Bowser’s many international adventures, he remained close to Rutgers. He was a member of multiple Rutgers Alumni groups, in 1900 being named the Orator Secundus at the annual Alumni Association meeting. He also had a prize named after him at Rutgers given out during his time there that was given to graduating Engineering students. Clearly Bowser was sentimental about Rutgers, and the school valued him too. Upon his death, the school was made responsible for his cremains. A memorial service was held for him in Kirkpatrick Chapel, and following that Rutgers decided to bury his ashes in Elmwood Cemetery, where he has remained since. He never married, and in a sense devoted himself to the school and his travels.
Sources:
“Biographical Sketch of the Late Prof. Bowser.” The Daily Home News. March 15, 1910. http://newbrunswick.archivalweb.com/imageViewer.php?i=692492&q=Edward%20bowser&s=q%3DEdward%2Bbowser%26p%3D2%26r%3D0.
Bowser, Edward A., 1868 (2 folders), Box: 35. Rutgers University Biographical Files: Alumni, R-Bio Alumni . Rutgers University Archives.
Bowser, Edward A. Letters. New Brunswick, N.J: New Brunswick Times, 1902.
“Bowser, Edward.” Water History, May 18, 2013. https://waterhistoryblog.wordpress.com/short-bios/historians-and-researchers/bowser-edward/.
“Bowser Services This Afternoon.” The Daily Home News. March 15, 1910. http://newbrunswick.archivalweb.com/imageViewer.php?i=692492&q=Edward%20bowser&s=q%3DEdward%2Bbowser%26p%3D2%26r%3D0.
“Egyptology.” Encyclopædia Britannica, October 10, 2013. https://www.britannica.com/science/Egyptology.
Sidar, Jean Wilson. George Hammell Cook: A Life in Agriculture and Geology. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1976.
“Tribute Paid to Prof. Bowser.” The Daily Home News. March 16, 1910. http://newbrunswick.archivalweb.com/imageViewer.php?i=692508&q=Edward%20bowser&s=q%3DEdward%2Bbowser%26p%3D2%26r%3D0.
Weibel, Charles. “A History of Mathematics at Rutgers.” Rutgers University, May 2007. https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~weibel/history.php.