Edward Alexander Bouchet was born on September 15, 1852, in New Haven, Connecticut. He was the last of Susan and William Bouchet’s four children. His father was a former slave in South Carolina who emigrated to the North, and eventually became a prominent member of the Black community of New Haven. Edward Bouchet attended primary school in one of the only three schools open to blacks, then entered New Haven High School, where he graduated in 1868. He was subsequently accepted at Hopkins Grammar School, from where he will graduate, the first of his class.
Edwards was then admitted to Yale University in 1870. He studied mathematics, physics, astronomy, mechanics, logic, rhetoric and 5 languages, including Latin and Greek. He graduated summa cum laude in 1874, ranking sixth out of 124 students; ten years after the abolition of slavery, and becoming the first African-American to obtain a degree at Yale University. This performance will lead him to be the first black nominee at Phi Beta Kappa, one of the oldest and most prestigious circles of academic excellence in the United States, to which former presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush Sr. belong (but Edward Bouchet will not be elected until 1884, after another Black, George Washington Henderson).
This very first black physicist of the modern era was ostracized by the university community. He was the only American to have never managed to teach at a university, despite his many qualifications. For 26 years, he taught physics and chemistry at the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia, then worked in various states before returning to New Haven, Connecticut, his hometown, where he died on October 28, 1918.
Despite the almost absolute anonymity in which he lived, Edward Alexander Bouchet was, as the first African-American to earn a Ph.D., and as one of the first American physicists, a prominent figure in Science of the 19th century and one of the biggest victims in the history of racial discrimination in the academic world. And as one of his former students said of him, “It is certainly impossible to measure the profound influence that Dr. Bouchet exerted on the hundreds of people he has encountered in his life. ”
The American Society of Physics, the most powerful organization of physicists in the United States instituted in 1996, in tribute to the physicist, the “Edward A. Bouchet Award” dedicated to the most brilliant students of minorities in the field of physics.
Bouchet was also among the first 20 Americans (of any race) to receive a Ph.D. in physics and was the sixth to earn a Ph.D. in physics from Yale.
