William S. (William Suddards) Franklin

William Suddards Franklin was an American physicist, electrical engineer, and teacher, born in Kansas in 1863. Sources agree that he studied at the University of Kansas, later taught there, and went on to hold academic posts at Iowa State College, Lehigh University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT Museum records list him as a professor of physics there from 1917 to 1929.

He built a strong reputation as both a scholar and a classroom writer. Contemporary and library sources describe him as an authority on alternating currents, and his published works include The Elements of Electrical Engineering, Electric Waves, and General Physics. Many of these books were written for technical schools and colleges, which helps explain why his name appears so often in early twentieth-century science and engineering catalogs.

Franklin died in 1930. He is remembered less as a public celebrity than as a serious educator whose textbooks aimed to make difficult ideas usable for students, especially in physics and electrical engineering.