John N. Cobb

John Nathan Cobb (February 20, 1868 – January 13, 1930) was an American author, naturalist, conservationist, canneryman, and educator who attained a high position in academia without the benefit of a college education. In a career that began as a printer's aide for a newspaper, he worked as a stenographer and clerk, a newspaper reporter, a field agent for the U.S. Fish Commission (USFC) and its successor, the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, as an editor for a commercial fishing trade magazine of the Pacific Northwest, and as a supervisor for companies in the commercial fishing industry. In 1919, Cobb was appointed the founding director of the College of Fisheries at the University of Washington (UW), the first such college established in the United States.

John Nathan Cobb was born in Oxford, New Jersey, on February 20, 1868, the son of Samuel Spencer Cobb (1842‒1921), a railroad engineer, and Louise Catherine Richard (1845?‒1918), a native of Belfort, France. He was one of at least twelve children in the family. He attended public schools and discontinued his education at an early age to go to work.

His family moved in the 1880s to Pennsylvania and records indicate that in 1884, at the age of 16 years, he was working for a Pennsylvania newspaper, the Carbondale Reader. He rose to become an editor of that periodical. For the next 15 years or so, Cobb worked, apparently as a stenographer and typist, in a variety of positions for a railroad company, a law firm, a supply and machinery enterprise, and a brick manufacturing company. In 1898, he married Harriet Collin Bidwell (1869‒1941), a cousin, with whom he had a daughter, Genevieve Catherine Cobb (1900‒1977) who graduated in zoology from the University of Washington and, after receiving a degree in librarianship at the UW, became a librarian at Princeton University and remained there until her retirement.

In 1895, Cobb successfully passed a civil service examination for the U.S. Government that qualified him for a position as stenographer and typist at a salary of $720 per year. He accepted a position in Washington, D.C., on 1 July 1895 with the U.S. Fish Commission, where he was appointed clerk in the Division of Statistics. He was promoted to "Field Agent" on February 11, 1896 at a salary of $1,000 per annum and was responsible for collecting commercial fishery statistics. Thus, Cobb began a career in fisheries that was to last until his death 35 years later and one that led to his recognition as an "expert" in fisheries statistics.

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