David Peck Todd

He studied at Columbia University from 1870 to 1872, then at Amherst College from 1873 to 1875, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in the class of 1875.

More information about the complex relationship among David Todd, Mabel Loomis Todd and Austin Dickinson can be found in After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America’s Greatest Poet[2] By 1917, David's deteriorating health and erratic mental behavior caused Amherst president Alexander Meiklejohn to force his early retirement from the College, and the couple moved to Coconut Grove, Florida.

[3] In 1922 Mabel and Millicent made the difficult decision to have David institutionalized; for the remainder of his life he was in and out of various mental and care facilities.

At the time of the 2004 Transit of Venus, astronomers at the Lick Observatory found and animated Todd’s still photos.

[4][5][6] In 1879, the last year of his life, Maxwell wrote to the astronomer David Todd (1855–1939), at the Nautical Almanac Office in Washington, D.C., asking whether the data on the eclipses of Jupiter's moons were accurate enough to detect the Earth's motion through the ether.

The letter came to the attention of a colleague of Todd, Albert Michelson (1852–1932), who had already carried out the best measurement, as of that time, of the speed of light in air.