This is the biography of a man who made his greatest contribution to science in his reorganization of the U.S. Coast Survey. Alexander Dallas Bache was appointed superintendent in 1843, and the Survey increased its scope and improved its methods in the study of winds, tides, currents, and harbors under his charge

Grandson of Benjamin Franklin, Bache was also active in education. Elected first president of Girard College when he was thirty, he visited European educational institutions in order to study their methods. And it may well be that, because of the admiration felt for his...