Wilbur Olin Atwater (May 3, 1844 – September 22, 1907) was an American chemist known for his studies of human nutrition and metabolism, and is considered the father of modern nutrition research and education. He is credited with developing the Atwater system, which laid the groundwork for nutrition science in the United States and inspired modern Olympic nutrition.Olympians Owe Gold Standard to 19th Century Chemist, Fox News. By Paul Martin. Published 31 July 2012. Retrieved 4 August 2012.
Atwater was director of the first United States Agricultural Experiment Station at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut and he was the U.S. Department of Agriculture's first chief of nutrition investigations.
Early life Atwater was born in Johnsburg, New York, the son of William Warren Atwater, a Methodist Episcopal minister, temperance advocate, and librarian of Yale Law School and Eliza (Barnes) Atwater. He grew up in, and spent much of his life in New England. He opted not to fight in the American Civil War, instead pursuing his undergraduate education, first at the University of Vermont and then moving to Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where he would complete his general education in 1865. For the next three years, Atwater was a teacher at various schools and in 1868, he enrolled in Yale University's Sheffield Scientific School, where he studied agricultural chemistry under William Henry Brewer and Samuel William Johnson. During his time at Yale, Atwater worked part time as Johnson's assistant analyzing fertilizers for specific mineral content; he also performed the first chemical analysis of food or feed in the United States. Atwater received his doctorate in 1869 in agricultural chemistry, his thesis was entitled The Proximate Composition of Several Types of American Maize, in it he used variations of the proximate analysis system to analyze four varieties of corn. Afterwards, he continued his education for the next two years in Leipzig and Berlin, studying physiological chemistry and acquainting himself with the agricultural experiment stations of Europe. During his time there, Atwater studied under German physiologist and dietitian, Carl von Voit and worked alongside Voit's student, Max Rubner. Atwater spent time traveling throughout Scotland, Rome, and Naples; on his trip he wrote articles about his observations for local newspapers based in the places he had lived in the United States. In 1871, Atwater returned to the United States to teach chemistry at East Tennessee University and the next year moved to Maine State College.
While there, Atwater met Marcia Woodard (1851–1932) of Bangor, Maine, the daughter of Abram Woodard. They married in 1874 and had two children: their daughter Helen in 1876 and their son Charles in 1885.
Career
Wilbur Atwater returned to Wesleyan as a professor of chemistry in 1873 and remained there until his death in 1907. Both he, and his mentor from Yale, Samuel Johnson, were proponents of bringing organizations to the United States similar to the agricultural experiment stations they saw in Europe. Atwater even described the German agricultural experiment stations in an 1875 report to the Department of Agriculture. To persuade the Connecticut legislature to appropriate money for a station, Orange Judd donated funds and Wesleyan offered laboratory facilities and Atwater's services on a part-time basis. Through their work and a $5,600 contribution from the Connecticut legislature for a two-year trial period, the first agricultural experiment station was created in the United States.
Atwater served as administrator of the trial run from 1875 until 1877 with initial research focused on fertilizers. Before the two-year trial was over, the Connecticut legislature agreed to regular funding of the station but had decided to move the permanent Connecticut Experiment Station to the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale with Samuel Johnson as first director. During this time, Atwater wrote numerous articles for scientific periodicals detailing his research and findings in physiological and agricultural chemistry and on research being conducted abroad (specifically in Germany). Many of his articles appeared in a column called "Science Applied to Farming", mostly discussing agricultural fertilizers in Orange Judd's American Agriculturalist.
During the initial phase of the first experiment station, Atwater expanded his fertilizer program and began to study and experiment with the growth and composition of field crops. The field crop research continued even after the appropriation ceased on a nearby farm; Atwater became particularly interested in plant metabolism and was one of the first researchers to provide proof that legumes assimilate nitrogen from the air.
As his experiments and accomplishments became known, Atwater's assistance was requested for a variety of projects. From 1879 to 1882, he conducted extensive human food studies on behalf of the United States Fish Commission and Smithsonian Institution. In 1879, the U.S. Fish Commission offered Atwater funds to study the composition and nutritional value of North American species of fish and invertebrates. For the 1882–1883 school year, Atwater took a leave of absence from Wesleyan to study the digestibility of lean fish with Carl von Voit in Germany. Together, they found fish comparable to lean beef; during this time he became aware of how German scientists were studying nutrition and hoped to bring similar research to the United States upon his return. In 1885, Atwater's first series of studies on peas grown in nutrient solution were published in the American Chemical Journal. That same year, the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor requested a study of data that had been collected by the bureau concerning family food purchases. In the study, Atwater calculated the daily per capita supplies of carbohydrates, fat, and protein provided within the data, and taking into account the included cost data, made recommendations on how more economical diets, while still having adequate nutritional value, could be chosen. The report he prepared was included in the Bureau's 1886 Annual Report.
Throughout this time, Atwater continued to campaign and support the expansion of state agricultural experiment stations. Due to their European research and experience with the government-funded European experiment stations, Atwater and Johnson had become consultants to the USDA and vocal promoters of federally regulated and funded agricultural research. Atwater had even begun writing in USDA publications in support of adopting the European model of scientific laboratories in domestic experiment stations. By 1885, Atwater and Johnson had begun advising Congress and President Grover Cleveland on the creation of experiment stations at the land-grant colleges created through the Morrill Act in 1862. In 1887, the Hatch Act was passed, which gave federal funds ($15,000 each) to the land-grant colleges to create experiment stations. As the Act was passed, Atwater was named director of the second agricultural experiment station in Connecticut that was established at Storrs Agricultural College, and he served there until 1892. The following year, the Office of Experiment Stations was created as a means to monitor and appraise the experiments and activities of the stations; Atwater was chosen as the first director. He accepted the position on the condition of being able to maintain both his professorship, and his position of director of the Storrs Agricultural Experiment Station. Atwater spent about 8 months of the year in Washington and had deputies act for him in his other positions during his absence.
Atwater saw his mission as director of the Office of Experiment Stations to be "to bring the stations throughout the country together, to unify their work, and to put them into communication with the great world of science." He immediately established a journal, the Experiment Station Record, meant to be a means of keeping the stations abreast of the scientific research being conducted by their colleagues and scientists abroad. Atwater made clear that the publication was meant to be a collection of scientific papers and not a platform for swapping farm tips. The publication was a means for the Hatch Act stations to report their research to the USDA, while also holding scientists accountable to particular standards of research and reporting. At the same time, Farmers' Bulletins were created to provide farmers with an easy to read and understand presentation of the findings of agricultural research stations and other scientific institutions. Through Atwater's role as director he was able to guide agricultural experiment station research towards scientific and experiment based methods.
Nutrition research and innovation Throughout his career, Atwater had been interested in human nutrition studies; having conducted the studies on behalf of the U.S. Fish Commission and the Smithsonian Institution, he had continued human nutrition research and the Storrs experiment station became known for nutritional studies. Once the Storrs station was created, Atwater and his colleagues had begun conducting and publishing studies on the chemical compositions of food. In 1891, he resigned as director of the Office of Experiment Stations in order to return to the Storrs and focus exclusively on nutrition research. After his resignation, Atwater was appointed special agent in charge of nutrition programs. Through this position he organized extensive food analyses, dietary studies, experiments on the digestibility of food, investigations of energy requirements using human subjects, and studies of the cost and economics of food use and production. In 1894, Atwater received his first congressional appropriation, allocated to his laboratory for human nutrition research. Atwater's studies during this time were used to create dietary standards. He based the standards off of average intakes, but did not regard them as quantitatively accurate; they logically varied based on age, sex, and activity level but he stressed that they were not metabolic studies.