Edwin E. Slosson

Edwin Emery Slosson was an American chemist who became one of the country’s most widely read science popularisers, working as literary editor of The Independent before becoming the first head of Science Service. His 1910 book Great American Universities grew out of a magazine series and was unusually blunt about what he thought lectures actually accomplished. He is better remembered for Creative Chemistry (1919), a genuine bestseller, than for the one-line joke that educators have been crediting to him since 1927.