It’s National Teacher Appreciation Day and although there are plenty of illustrious Stevens faculty to choose from, we wanted to shine a light on one professor with a rather famous son. Most of us are familiar with Alfred Charles Kinsey, “the world’s most famous sex researcher,” according to the Washington Post, who attended Stevens for two years before dropping out and going on to study Western attitudes towards human sexuality. But lesser known is his father, Alfred Seguine Kinsey, who taught at Stevens for well over half a century. In the late 1800s, Kinsey Sr. began his apprenticeship as a shop boy in the newly founded Stevens Institute of Technology. In 1891 he became an assistant to Professor Denton in the Department of Engineering Practice. Later on 1908, Kinsey was promoted to full-time faculty as head of the Department of Shop Instruction where he remained until his retirement.

Though not the world’s greatest father by most accounts, Kinsey’s contributions to the field of Mechanical Engineering and its practice in the shop were highly influential at the time and are still studied today.