William Morris Davis

William Morris Davis, often called the father of American geography, was an American geographer, geologist and geomorphologist born February 12, 1850, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who died February 5, 1934, in Pasadena, California, and who developed the geographical cycle, also called the cycle of erosion, first set out in his 1889 article The Rivers and Valleys of Pennsylvania, a model explaining how rivers erode uplifted land to base level through youthful, mature and old-age stages, and introducing the related concept of the peneplain. He worked as a meteorologist in Cordoba, Argentina, for three years, served as a field assistant to Nathaniel Shaler, became an instructor in geology at Harvard University in 1879, rose to a full professorship in 1890, and retired from Harvard in 1911. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1884, the American Philosophical Society in 1899 and the National Academy of Sciences in 1904, won the Hayden Memorial Geological Award in 1917, the Patron Medal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1919, and the Vega Medal in 1920, served as president of the Geological Society of America in 1911, and received the Penrose Medal in 1931.