[125] The book in which Beebe summarized this expedition, titled Galpagos: World's End, was an instant best-seller and remained on the New York Times top ten list for several months. Although it was intended as an expedition for the zoo, Beebe described it as "our third honeymoon this year". Beebe based this theory on his observation that the hatchlings and embryos of some modern birds possess long quill feathers on their legs, which he regarded as an atavism; he also noticed vestiges of leg-wings on one of the specimens of Archaeopteryx. Beebe's study of these currents, and their effect on the climate of South America, is the earliest known study of the phenomenon known as El Nio. Meanwhile, Beebe began searching for a new tropical research station to replace Kartabo, which had fallen victim to deforestation just like Kalacoon before it. [231] Beebe devised an unusual method for determining how he would react to his visitors at Simla. [206] Creole Petroleum, a Venezuelan spin-off of Standard, agreed to cover the cost of the station and finished a small portion of the vast structure for Beebe and his team to use. William Beebe is regarded as one of the founders of the field of ecology, as well as one of the early 20th century's major advocates of conservation. An entry in Beebe's personal journal, written in a secret code that he used when describing things he wished kept secret, reads "I kissed her [Gloria] and she loves me. [104][110] In January 1919 Roosevelt, who was severely ill by this point, wrote to Beebe from his hospital bed congratulating Beebe on the publication of his monograph. October 18, 1943 - September 4, 2020. Searching for a way to satisfy his expedition's donors, Beebe hit upon the idea of documenting the marine life of the Hudson Gorge just beyond the shore of New York City. This was the first time a biologist observed deep-sea animals in their native environment and set several successive records for the deepest dive ever performed by a human, the deepest of which stood until it was broken by Barton 15 years later. [174], In 1931, Beebe and Barton's Bathysphere dives were interrupted for a year due to technical problems and uncooperative weather. [24] This was eventually built, although at less than half the size that Beebe had originally requested. While 83 of the fish that he described were done so in a conventional manner, the remaining four were done so based on visual observations. Beebe had far more field experience than either of the two others accompanying him on the expedition, G. Inness Hartley and Herbert Atkins, making this his introduction to the role of a mentor. Remembering the early studies of his own childhood, in which he had brought specimens to the American Museum of Natural History, he was happily working with them. During these trips, Beebe also developed an interest in dredging, the practice of using nets to haul up animals that lived deep underwater and attempting to study them before they died or disintegrated. [50], In 1907, the journal Zoologica was founded by Osborn and Hornaday specifically as a place for Beebe to publish his research. [188] With the help of Beebe's friend the physician Henry Lloyd, Beebe conducted an expedition in the West Indies examining the stomach contents of tuna, which uncovered previously unknown larval forms of several species of fish. [62] Hornaday strongly objected to this proposal, describing Kuser as an "evil genius" who was attempting to steal Beebe away from his duties at the zoo. [283] It is also a popular destination for birdwatchers, who can observe the same populations of hummingbirds, tanagers and oilbirds that William Beebe studied decades earlier.[279]. [142], Shortly after Beebe's return from this expedition, Anthony Kuser requested that Beebe produce a condensed, popular version of his pheasant monograph. [79] When the plague and riots had subsided, Beebe returned to China to document the local pheasant species, then made a second visit to Japan to study pheasants kept in the Imperial Preserves there. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. [146], In 1927, Beebe went on an expedition to Haiti to document its marine life. [80], His expedition was completed after a total of 17 months, Beebe and Blair crossed the Pacific to San Francisco, then crossed the United States to return to their home in New York. He was the coinventor of the bathysphere. [13], In 1896, Beebe was accepted with advanced placement to Columbia University. [103] With his new position, Beebe no longer had the duty of caring for the zoo's animals, freeing him to devote himself fully to his writing and research. [213] He was by this point the only remaining member of the zoo's original staff,[214] and had produced more scholarly papers and publicity than any other employee. William W. Beebe, Jr. of Silver Springs, Florida passed away on Wednesday, July 6, 2022 at the age of 64. Mr. Beebe was born on September 22nd, 1946 at Holland. [24], Beebe nonetheless exhibited a high degree of loyalty to those employees who were capable of meeting his standards. [211] Beebe described his experiences at Rancho Grande in his 1949 book High Jungle, which was the last of Beebe's major books. [166] Barton had the good fortune that years earlier, Theodore Roosevelt had proposed a similar idea to Beebe, and Beebe approved of Barton's design. [252] However, Hornaday never publicly expressed his disagreements with Beebe and did not hesitate to defend Beebe's work when others criticized it.[253]. [12] Beebe's first article was published while he was still in high school, a description of a bird called a brown creeper, which appeared in the January 1895 issue of the magazine Harper's Young People. He graduated from Fremont High School in 1947, after returning from an enlistment with the U.S. Navy. [89] On the other hand, some biographers have suggested that Beebe suffered a nervous breakdown during the expedition and that he may have contributed his own part to Blair's alienation. Born August 7, 1944 in Manito to Rollin A. and Rosie B. After failing to find such evidence, Heilmann ultimately rejected Beebe's Tetrapteryx hypothesis, and this remained the consensus among ornithologists for the next several decades. William Thomas Beebe, who retired last year as board chairman of Delta Air Lines, died of a heart attack Saturday after surgery at Doctors Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. [191] Beebe described his two expeditions onboard the Zaca in his books Zaca Venture and The Book of Bays, in which he emphasized his concern for threatened habitats and his dismay at human destruction. [51] The following year Beebe received a promotion from the Zoological Society, placing him on equal footing with the research scientists at the Museum of Natural History. Elswyth, who was most content in temperate environments, began searching for a home in New England where she could continue her writing. "[87] Beebe made very little effort to contest the divorce and did not appear in court to offer any testimony. It is with deep sorrow that we announce the death of Connie McAfee of Beebe, Arkansas, born in Brinkley, Arkansas, who passed away on February 22, 2023, at the age of 61, leaving to mourn family and friends. [176] Although Beebe and Barton performed no dives in 1933, their work gathered a large amount of publicity when the Bathysphere was displayed in a special exhibit for the American Museum of Natural History, and later at the Century of Progress World's Fair in Chicago, where they shared the fair's Hall of Science with Auguste Piccard. Beebe's Tetrapteryx hypothesis is now regarded as prescient for its prediction of both the anatomy and likely gliding posture of Microraptor gui,[274] which Richard O. Prum has described as "[looking] as if it could have glided straight out of the pages of Beebes notebooks. [44] This book was a reworking of a manuscript that Beebe had submitted to Henry Holt in 1902, but which Holt had asked him to expand into a major work on birds. In addition to the open nature of their marriage, Elswyth described in a 1940s interview with Today's Woman magazine that she enjoyed the knowledge that Beebe was attractive to women. [121], Beebe's first expedition to the Galpagos lasted twenty days, broken into two ten-day periods, between which the Noma was forced to return to Panama for fresh water and coal. [48], Although Beebe continued to shoot animals when it was necessary for examining them scientifically, he no longer regarded adding to a collection as a valid reason to take a life. [108] Beebe's duties as curator were passed to Lee Crandall, the former Assistant Curator who had worked under Beebe,[109] although Crandall continued to rely on Beebe for help treating illness in birds, and caring for the exotic birds brought back from Beebe's expeditions. Family and friends are welcome to send flowersor leave their condolences on this memorial page and share them with the family. [97] Soon after Beebe and his researchers moved into the plantation house, which was known by the name of Kalacoon, they were paid a visit by Theodore Roosevelt and his family. [194] Like Hollister before her, Crane would eventually become Beebe's lover during the long expeditions that Beebe made without Elswyth's companionship. [159], With the financial help of his sponsors, Beebe planned to use his new research station on Nonsuch Island to conduct a thorough study of an 8-mile (13km) square area of ocean, documenting every living thing they could find from the surface to a depth of 2 miles (3.2km). [272] Beebe, however, continued to advance his Tetrapteryx hypothesis as late as the 1940s. The divorce was granted on August 29, 1913, after Blair had spent the minimum requirement of six months as a resident in Reno. [143] The book which resulted from this, titled Pheasants: Their Lives and Homes (also known by the title Pheasants of the World), was released in 1926 and received the John Burroughs Medal. [34] In July 1903, at the request of a lawyer named Louis Whealton whom the zoo's director William Temple Hornaday regarded as a potential donor to the zoo, Beebe and Blair went on another expedition to Virginia's Barrier Islands. [201] Beebe and his team used this station to study the ecology of the region and recorded how its inhabitants were affected by its cycle of wet and dry seasons. Leave a sympathy message to the family on the memorial page of William Beebe to pay them a last tribute. [256], William Beebe was a pioneer in the field now known as ecology. [69] After Beebe had finished his documentation in the eastern part of the range, Horsfall refused to accompany Beebe in the western part of the range, causing Beebe to leave him in the town of Jorepokhri and continue his work in the Western Himalayas without him. [38] Although the purpose of the expedition was to discover, identify and collect Mexico's birds,[39] it has also been described as yet another honeymoon between him and Blair. [107], Beebe's position in the Zoological Society changed in 1918: He was given the title of Honorary Curator of Birds and was made the director of the newly created Department of Tropical Research. [114], In 1919, Osborn helped secure Beebe a new research station in Guiana to replace Kalacoon: Beebe was offered Kartabo Point, an outpost of a New York-based mining corporation. He retired in 1996 from Quali-Chem, had also worked for DuBois Chemical, and was a milkman for Superior Dairy. [66], After crossing the Atlantic Ocean on the RMS Lusitania to London, where they gathered the supplies they would need for their expedition, Beebe and his team traveled across the Mediterranean Sea to Egypt, through the Suez Canal, and across the Indian Ocean to Ceylon, where they began their task of documenting the native wildfowl. The Galpagos animals generally showed no fear of humans, causing the team to have a high degree of success at capturing live specimens for the zoo. The reason they gave in their annual report was that the previous two seasons had produced so much material that they needed an additional year to analyze it, but in reality, this was more the result of insufficient funding as well as the unstable state of Venezuelan politics. William R. "Bill" Beebe, 78, of Dover died Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at Union Hospital with complications of a long term illness. [220][223] In honor of his lifetime of work as a naturalist, Beebe was awarded the Theodore Roosevelt Distinguished Service Medal in 1953. [4][5] Early in his life, his family moved to East Orange, New Jersey, where he began to acquire both his fascination with the natural world and his tendency to record everything he saw. [67] From Ceylon they traveled to Calcutta, with the goal of capturing the species of pheasants which live only in the Himalayas. [279] By 1971, the station had fallen into disuse and was declared closed. [2] Several factors contributed to this decision, including both excitement at being part of the zoo, and the sense that his studies were putting too much of a strain on his family's finances. [152], By this point in his life Beebe was developing a close friendship with the American romance novelist Elswyth Thane, who had met Beebe in 1925. [114], During the course of his career, Beebe authored over 800 articles and 21 books, including his four-volume pheasant monograph. No, I don't want any bored men around me. [265] The naming of a new species ordinarily requires obtaining and analyzing a type specimen, something which was obviously impossible from inside the Bathysphere. [68] By this point Beebe was beginning to conflict with Horsfall, who was unaccustomed to such expeditions. This study yielded a collection of 3,776 fish of 136 species, many of them also new to science. [151] He later went so far as to suggest that beachfront homes would someday contain their own underwater gardens, to be experienced with the help of diving helmets: If you wish to make a garden, choose some beautiful slope or reef grotto and with a hatchet chop and pry off coral boulders with waving purple sea-plumes and golden sea-fans and great particolored anemones. , Florida passed away on Wednesday, July 6, 2022 at the age of 64 as an for! 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