Departures of note

Mark Walrod Harrington, a prominent scientist and former president of the University of Washington, disappeared from his home one evening in 1899, leaving his wife and son without word for nearly a decade. In 1908, his son discovered a newspaper article about an unidentified man admitted to the State Asylum for the Insane at Morristown, New Jersey, known only as John Doe No. 8. That man was Harrington, who had lost his memory but later developed a fondness for music while institutionalized. He never left the facility and died there on September 10, 1926.

Born in Sycamore, Illinois, in 1848, Harrington pursued a wide-ranging scientific career. From 1879 to 1891, he served as professor of astronomy and director of the Detroit Observatory at the University of Michigan, where he published an astronomical observation later cataloged as NGC 7040. He also founded The American Meteorological Journal in 1884 and edited its first seven volumes.

In 1891, President Benjamin Harrison appointed Harrington as the first chief of the newly civilian U.S. Weather Bureau, a role he held until 1895, when Secretary of Agriculture J. Sterling Morton persuaded President Grover Cleveland to dismiss him. That same year, Harrington was elected president of the University of Washington, serving until 1897. His academic achievements, which included fluency in half a dozen languages, were ultimately overshadowed by his mysterious disappearance and the circumstances of his final years.