Joel Dorman Steele

Joel Dorman Steele (May 14, 1836 – May 25, 1886) was an American educator. He and his wife Esther Baker Steele were important textbook writers of their period, on subjects including American history, chemistry, human physiology, physics, astronomy, and zoology. He was an influential figure in the movement to standardize science education in the mid-late 19th century. In the preface to his posthumous Popular Physics, the publisher writes that his books "attained an extraordinary degree of popularity, due to the author's attractive style, his great skill in the selection of material suited to the demands of the schools for which the books were intended, his sympathetic spirit toward both teachers and pupils, and his earnest Christian character, which was exhibited in all his writing." Born May 14, 1836, in Lima, New York, he became a country schoolteacher at the age of 17, leaving that position after an outbreak of typhoid fever killed his mother in 1851. He graduated from Genesee College (which later became Syracuse University) in 1858, and became a school principal in Oswego County in 1859.