Charles H. (Charles Henry) Snow

Born in 1863, Charles Henry Snow was an American engineer, educator, and technical writer closely associated with New York University. NYU archival and departmental history sources identify him as a longtime faculty member who joined the engineering school in the 1890s and went on to serve as dean for decades, helping guide the school through a period of major growth.

Snow is best remembered as the author of works on timber and structural materials, including The Principal Species of Wood: Their Characteristic Properties and Wood and Other Organic Structural Materials. The title pages and library records for these books show the mix that defines his writing: solid engineering knowledge presented in a way meant to be useful to students, builders, and general readers interested in how materials behave.

He also appears in NYU archival collections connected with World War I, including material for an unpublished manuscript about the university during the war. Taken together, these sources suggest a writer whose books grew directly out of a long academic career and a practical interest in how engineering knowledge could be explained clearly.