Susan Faye Cannon, born Walter Faw Cannon (October 15, 1925, Durham, North Carolina – November 6, 1981, Washington, D.C.), was an American historian of science, physicist, and Smithsonian Institution curator.
[1] Turning to the history of science, she earned her PhD from Harvard University in 1956, with a dissertation on uniformity and progression in early Victorian cosmography.
[1] In the early 1960s, she wrote influential articles on uniformitarian geology, the "Cambridge network," William Whewell's tidology, John Herschel, the relation of Charles Darwin to William Paley, liberal Anglicanism, and the general place of science in nineteenth-century culture.
[1] From 1962 to 1979, Cannon was a historian of science and a Curator of the Classical Physics and Geosciences collection at the Smithsonian Institution.
Cannon was found dead of a codeine overdose November 6, 1981 in Washington, D.C.[1][3]