In February 1885 Reid was granted his doctorate with a dissertation on the spectra of platinum, an assignment typical of those that Rowland - the pioneering figure in modern spectral studies - gave his students.

Mrs. Gittings left a diary, written on four small account books and now in the special collections department of the Johns Hopkins University library, that gives valuable information about their early years as a family.

Among her observations was that her daughter regarded the German language as one of “sneezes and splutters.” Gittings found the wintertime climate of Berlin to be “foggy and dismal,” noted that the locals still ate dinner in mid-afternoon, and saw that some students (even visiting Americans) continued to fight duels.

Reid was soon introduced to J. J. Thomson, a young physicist who had recently been appointed to a professorship at Trinity College and made director of the Cavendish Laboratory.

J. J. Thomson was 29 at the time they first met; Harry Fielding Reid was 26. Letters exchanged among the various family members reflect an intimacy that was born of their very early years together.

By the spring of 1896, however, he and his immediate family were back living in Baltimore for good, and they moved into a large townhouse on Cathedral Street, just a short distance from Mt.

Harvey Cushing went to Baltimore in 1896 to train at the newly founded Johns Hopkins Hospital before being chosen to head the surgery department at Brigham in Boston.

Reid's trip to Alaska resulted in his first professional publication, a long article in volume IV of the National Geographic Magazine, in those years still an academic journal.

Conditions in Alaska during that era could be at best called “pioneer,” and field scientists had no choice but to live in huts on the ice or else on camp on bare rock.

The U.S. Navy sent a vessel past once each week during the warmer months, but the Glacier Bay region, like most of the territory of Alaska, was otherwise a wilderness that had only had the most cursory exploration done prior to 1890.

Reid's British friend and colleague, J. J. Thomson, made use of a similar interest in measurement to prove the existence of the electron as a particle with both mass and charge.

During the previous generation European scientists had begun to wonder if faults were related to earthquakes, and vice versa, but it was Harry Fielding Reid who established that there was a clear and dynamic relationship.

[3][4] He corresponded with various European Societies concerned with glaciology and seismology, and in December 1926 he and his wife traveled to Japan as invited guests of an international conference on earthquake studies.

Harry Fielding Reid's life bridged the gap that divided the early years of modern science, when successful men like Sir Joseph Banks and Benjamin Franklin worked on their own or financed the work of their friends, and a later era, from the final decades of the 19th century, when government and institutional financing caused science to become better organized even as it was made into a more bureaucratic enterprise.

Here seems a clear illustration of the turn that scientific inquiry was taking by 1902: there was evidently no regular income involved, yet Reid was not expected to foot the bill entirely on his own.

Government subsidy – also taking place at Johns Hopkins as the geology faculty did work for the Maryland State Highway Department after 1898 – also meant greater accountability: hence Reid's careful recording of expenses.

Reid's sister Ellen married the celebrated poet and preacher Henry van Dyke, who was the author of dozens of books, taught English at Princeton and served as U.S. Minister to the Netherlands during World War I.