Collier, George H

From Lane Co Oregon

GEORGE H. COLLIER

George Collier (1827-1916) joined the University of Oregon faculty in 1879, as a professor of physics and chemistry. His genial and dignified manner endeared him to all and served as his authority in the classroom, recalled former student Frederic Dunn in 1934. “There was no thought of correction or disciplinary measure where Dr. Collier taught, for his very modesty and wholesome absence of egotism would have made a student misdemeanor seem like crime against divinity.”

Collier and his wife, Sybel Smith Collier, had seven children, and in 1885 began building a large house at the corner of 13th and University streets. They moved in the following year, and it served as their home until Collier left the UO faculty in 1895. The university bought the house in 1896, intending to make it a women’s dormitory. But that plan was quickly abandoned, and the house became the home of UO presidents from 1899 to 1941, and later the Faculty Club. Today it is a Eugene landmark, operating as a restaurant open to the general public. A nineteenth-century educator, Collier was forced to retire early when the young and progressive president, C.H. Chapman, restructured the UO curriculum to attract faculty with more modern training. But although the physics professor’s background may have been somewhat dated, his outlook was to the future. When discussing the theory of sound vibrations one day in the early 1880s, Collier was asked by a student if he thought telegraphic messages would ever be sent without the use of wires.

“No question of it,” the professor replied. “I may not live to see it, but the rest of you will.” He was half right. The first successful wireless messages were sent in 1895, twenty-one years before Collier died.