The Advisor
Born in Springfield, Tenn. In 1868, John Hutchinson Ogburn graduated from Vanderbilt University with a Civil Engineering degree. In 1893, he became the assistant astronomer at Dudley Observatory in Albany, NY, where he did work on the orbits of "minor planets", i.e., asteroids. The same year, Charles L. Thornburg came to Lehigh from Vanderbilt, where he was later to become the legendary chair of the department. When Charles L. Doolittle left Lehigh and went to University of Pennsylvania, Thornburg invited his former Vanderbilt student, Reynolds, to Lehigh to replace Doolittle. Ogburn accepted the invitation and came to South Mountain in 1895.
At Lehigh, Ogburn started teaching in the Mathematics and Astronomy Department with full energy. For his twenty four hour devotion to his job, students sarcastically nicknamed him "Lazy Jack".
In 1904, the Lehigh trustee Robert Sayre donated to the university a zenith telescope and the Observatory Annex. Ogburn devoted a great amount of time with this fine instrument on the astronomical problem known as the "variation of latitude." The results of these studies were published as "Lehigh University Astronomical Papers, Volume 1, Part I. Results of Observations with the Zenith Telescope of the Sayre Astronomical Observatory ..." Ogburn presented a paper from this work at the American Philosophical Society, which brought international notice to Lehigh's astronomical research.
Ogburn taught mathematics and astronomy at Lehigh for 44 years.
Ogburn's Obituary
"John Hutchinson Ogburn: an Intimate Portrait". Lehigh Alumni Bulletin, vol.45 no.7, May 1958
The author of this obituary, Ralph van Arnam, was a professor at the Department of Mathematics and Astronomy.