Lehigh County has reason to be proud of the achievements of Elmer Peter Kohler, of Egypt, who for many years was chairman of the Department of Chemistry as well as the Sheldon Emery Professor of Organic Chemistry in Harvard University. He died May 25, 1938 and is buried in the Egypt Cemetery.

Arthur B. Lamb, an associate at Harvard, prepared the following sketch of his life:

Elmer Peter Kohler was born on November 6, 1865, in the village of Egypt, Pennsylvania. His immigrant ancestor, Jacob Kohler, from Muhlhauscn in Switzerland, in 1728-30 was the first settler in the vicinity of Egypt and acquired there a large tract of fertile land by warrants from the Penn heirs. Through succeeding generations the Kohler remained in Egypt as prosperous farmers, millers and merchants.

Elmer grew up on the ancestral farm and in the ancestral mill, profiting greatly from the education that they afforded. An alert, venturesome, self-reliant boy, unusually observant and thoughtful, he made botanical and mineralogical collections and learned the peculiarities of plants and the ways of animals.
In the mill and among the farm machines which his progressive father installed he developed that mechanical skill which proved so useful to him in his later life. Above all, and by much hard work, he mastered the science and the practice of farming.

In 1886 he graduated, with honors, from the Classical Course at Muhlenberg College, in nearby Allentown. Shortly thereafter he journeyed West to seek his fortune and became a Special Passenger Agent on the Santa Fe. He was successful in this work and liked it, particularly the trips all over the Southwest, but he soon longed for wider intellectual horizons and in 1888 returned to Muhlenberg for another year of study.

At this time, through his own reading rather than by formal instruction, his interest in chemistry was awakened and in the following year he went to Johns Hopkins University to study organic chemistry under Ira Remsen. Johns Hopkins was then the Mecca in our country for those interested in the advanced study of this subject. Kohler developed rapidly in this environment and though previously untrained in chemistry obtained his doctorate in three years (1892).

Appointment to an instructorship at Bryn Mawr promptly followed and he was the first to teach organic chemistry at that institution. There he won recognition as a stimulating lecturer, an efficient teacher and a productive scholar. He soon became influential in the college at large and was recognized as the informal counselor of the president, M. Cary Thomas, whose robust and discerning personality had so much in common with his own.

In 1912, after twenty fruitful and happy years at Bryn Mawr, Kohler came to Harvard to give the courses in elementary chemistry and in advanced organic chemistry, previously given by Charles Loring Jackson and Henry B. Hill, respectively. In 1914 he was appointed Abbott and James Lawrence Professor.

Kohler's academic career was interrupted in 1918 when he was granted leave of absence to assume the direction of research in the Offense Section of the Chemical Warfare Service of the United States Army. There, thanks to his broad knowledge of applied as well as theoretical chemistry his good sense and his active and resolute leadership, he soon rescued this branch of the army's work from the confusion in which he had found it and made it a conspicuous success. He returned to Harvard in the fall of 1919.

Kohler's mature wisdom, keen insight and inveterate fairness were recognized at Harvard as they had been at Bryn Mawr and he was called upon to serve on many important committees. He was a member of the Administrative Board of the Graduate School for many years and in 1926 was Acting Dean of that School during the absence of Dean Chase. In 1934 he was appointed Sheldon Emory Professor of Organic Chemistry and in the same year he took over the chairmanship of the Department of Chemistry.

Kohler was in the full tide of his multifarious activities as investigator, teacher and administrator when he was overtaken by his brief, final illness. He died on May 25, 1938.

Kohler was preeminently an investigator, and as such was outstanding both in the extent and in the quality of his achievements. Arriving at Bryn Mawr, young, inexperienced and isolated, he promptly began a long succession of significant, carefully planned, skillfully executed and elegantly reported experimental investigations in his chosen field of organic chemistry. In some of the experimental work he was assisted by able young women students whom he had himself trained, but most of his researches were carried out entirely with his own hands. At Harvard, in spite of his numerous duties as teacher, committeeman and administrator, his scientific productivity increased. He had, of course, many more collaborators and assistants than at Bryn Mawr, but he continued unremittingly his own personally executed investigations. Indeed, one searches in vain for any chemist in recent times who has turned out so great a quantity of experimental investigation performed with his own hands. He was a virtuoso m the experimental art. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of his whole field, keen insight and sound judgment.

Kohler possessed phenomenal powers of observation which functioned not only in his work but in all his daily contacts. A walk in the country or through city streets yielded him a surprising amount of information and his memory was unusually retentive. To the end of his life the physical minutiae of his observations as a lad on the farm or of his youthful experiences in the Southwest were as fresh as though they were of yesterday.

Most remarkable of all was the continued flexibility and freshness of his mind. He was always abreast of the times and to the last was as receptive and sympathetic to new ideas as the most enthusiastic youngster. His mental as well as his physical vigor were maintained undiminished up to his last brief illness.

Kohlcr was a great teacher. His skill as a lecturer and his wide, first-hand familiarity with the everyday applications of chemistry to agriculture, to industry and to physiology brought him success in Chemistry A, the introductory course in general chemistry. His astonishing grasp of the bewilderingly multiplex and protean science of organic chemistry and his flair for simple and lucid presentation established his Chemistry 5 as a veritable masterpiece famous among organic chemists the country over.

More important, however, than his activities as a lecturer were his daily associations with his students in the laboratory. It was here that he left an indelible imprint. A thorough training in organic chemistry was the immediate goal of his teaching, but diligence, forethought, independence, enterprise and integrity were his more fundamental objectives. Practicing what he preached, a zealot in his science and a master of his craft, he taught as much by example as by precept. Truly Spartan in his own life, Kohler scorned sentimentality and always told the simple truth as he saw it, no matter how unpalatable it might be. Firm, courageous and indomitable, he was a wise and kindly counsellor and a loyal friend.