Alexander C. Humphreys

On the Century’s representation in the two great professions of education and medicine, the year has laid heavy toll. Alexander Crombie Humphreys had the unusual distinction of achieving eminence in three separate careers—as engineer, as art collector and as educator. Coming from Scotland a boy of eight, he dreamed at first of still another career and fitted for West Point, being rejected only because he was under age when he applied. Thrown back on civil life, he entered the field of lighting engineering and in due course, with remarkable rapidity, became executive officer of one large lighting corporation, then of a larger one and finally of the largest. It was of him that a humorous associate said that, by his plants in half a dozen countries, he made two blades of gas glow where one glew before. It was only after he had become an engineer by nature and grace that he found opportunity for study and was graduated from Stevens Institute of Technology at the age of thirty, subsequently frequenting foreign universities and receiving honors from those and other similar institutions at home. When, at fifty, he lost his two sons through a vacation accident on the Nile, he accepted the presidency of Stevens Institute. In that office, during twenty-five years, he developed notably the work of the institution, relating theory and experience, becoming the recognized leader in movements for the study of economics in engineering schools, leading the movement against federal taxation of gifts for education and against local taxation of educational property.

At the Century Dr. Humphreys was best known as a champion of American painting. His outstanding collection included nearly a hundred pictures by fellow-Centurions.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1928 Century Association Yearbook