Harold Jacoby

Harold Jacoby had an individuality of his own, in person as in conversation. The Graham Library exchange of views was promptly stimulated whenever Jacoby strolled in after dinner and contributed his own shrewd observations. Astronomy was not always or often the subject of his talk, though Jacoby had taught that science for a quarter of a century. He had his own ideas, more or less whimsical, on public characters or topics of the day; but controversial comment quickened if the conversation turned to Percival Lowell and the canals on Mars. Jacoby disbelieved profoundly in the Martian internal waterways. He was convinced that the planetary public works on Lowell’s photographs were merely blemishes in the negative, and expressed the strongest skepticism about an imagined branch of the human family which had settled down in another part of the solar system and escaped our genealogies. Not perhaps a pathfinder in his chosen science, Jacoby was familiar with all past and present discoveries in it; he kept his classes at Columbia abreast of them. He planned for the Grand Central that overhead astronomical panorama, observation of which delights the arriving visitor from Kansas or Oklahoma and strains his vertebral column. Jacoby was one of the very few men encountered in our ordinary life who understood the Einstein theory. Needless to say, he had the floor to himself in the Graham Library when the conversation turned in that direction.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1933 Century Association Yearbook