American educator and scientist Alexander Dallas Bache (1806-1867) was the first president of the National Academy of Sciences.

Alexander Bache, the great-grandson of Benjamin Franklin, was born in Philadelphia on July 19, 1806. He entered West Point at the age of 15. The youngest in his class, he graduated with highest achievement on July 1, 1825, and stayed on for a year as an assistant in engineering. During the following 2 years he worked as an Army construction engineer, assigned to Newport, R.I. There he met Nancy Clarke Fowler, whom he married in 1828. That year he resigned from the Army and accepted a professorship in chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. As a member of the Franklin Institute for the Promotion of Mechanic Arts and of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, he conducted notable scientific studies in general mechanics, terrestrial magnetism, and weights and measures.

Bache's interest in the broader problems of...