Edward Wheeler Scripture

Biography

Edward Wheeler Scripture was born in Mason, New Hampshire on May 21, 1864. As a child, his family lived in New York City where he later completed his undergraduate education at the College of the City of New York in 1884. He met and married May Kirk in Berlin in 1890. The couple had three children. Scripture received a Dr. phil. from Leipzig University under his advisor Wilhelm Wundt. His graduate dissertation addressed the association of ideas.

After graduation from Leipzig, Scripture and his family returned to the United States in 1891 where he was hired as faculty by Granville Stanley Hall at Clark University. He continued working at Clark University for one year and then took a faculty appointment at Yale University. He established an experimental psychology laboratory at Yale where he and his wife conducted research on phonetics. While at Yale, Scripture developed a timer for studying reaction times known as a pendulum chronoscope, otherwise known as a pendulum timer. On July 8, 1892, Scripture along with Granville Stanley Hall co-founded the American Psychological Association. In 1902, Scripture received the first grant for experimental psychology from the Carnegie Institution in order to study the sounds of human speech. After a debate concerning the definition of the science of psychology with George Trumbull Ladd, Chair of the department, Scripture was fired from Yale in 1903. Ladd was also let go by Yale.

Scripture returned to Germany, where he earned a medical degree from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in 1906. After obtaining a Dr. med. he returned to America. In 1915, he took a position at Columbia University, where he studied the use of electric current as an anesthetic before shifting his focus to the study of speech and language. He later started a neurology laboratory and the Vanderbilt Speech Clinic at the Columbia Medical Center. May Scripture was an expert in language disorders herself, and she served as the director of speech correction at the Vanderbilt Clinic. May Scripture filed for separation from her husband, alleging that his laboratory assistant, Ethel King, had enticed her husband into a relationship. May Scripture also sued King for $50,000. May Scripture claimed that neither her husband nor King could be located. She also asserted that her husband had sold his office furniture before absconding. After the separation, May Scripture continued to work with Edward at the clinic.

Scripture traveled to London in 1919, where he began a speech clinic at West End Hospital for Nervous Diseases. In 1929, he left London for Vienna in order to accept a position in experimental phonetics at the University of Vienna. On July 31, 1945, Scripture died in Henleaze, England at the age of 81.