Dayton Ernest Carritt papers

Dayton Ernest Carritt was born March 12, 1915 to Ernest and Laura (Cave) Carritt, in Boston, Massachusetts. He received his B.S. from the University of Rhode Island in 1937, and his Ph.D. in analytical chemistry from Harvard University in 1948. He married Jeanne R. Brooks, whom he met in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and with whom he had a son, Jan B. Dayton Carritt first worked at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution from 1937-1938 as a chemical technician under Dr. Norris Rakestraw, and was associated with the Institution of and off until his death in 1993.

From 1941-1942 Carritt served as a research chemist for the Bureau of Ships, in Woods Hole, MA. From 1942-1943 he taught chemistry at URI before becoming a chemist on the Manhattan Project at the Las Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico from 1943-1946. He later taught chemistry at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, from 1947-1951, and served as associate professor of oceanography at the Chesapeake Bay Institute of Johns Hopkins University in Maryland from 1951-1960. At Chesapeake Bay, Carritt also served as assistant director at in the 1950’s.

In 1960, Carritt became the first appointed scientific staff member under the WHOI’s new National Science Foundation grant to support the expansion of its chemistry program. Carritt’s appointment was a joint one between WHOI and MIT, where Carritt served as associate professor in the Geology and Geophysics Department. He carried on a full time research program at WHOI and supplemented it with teaching and research at MIT. His main interest at WHOI was the reevaluation of the concept of constant ratio among the main constituents of seawater; and a secondary interest was the reevaluation and refinement of oxygen measurements in the sea.

When he became a professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst in 1971, he was involved with the University’s Institute for Man and His Environment, and did aerial survey tracking of waste disposal throughout the East Coast. He also surveyed and tracked environmental changes from nuclear waste disposal and acted as a consultant. Carritt enjoyed flying, owned his own plane, and took many aerial photographs of the Massachusetts coastline.

Carritt was a member of the Chemical Society, the Geophysical Union, the Society of Limnology and Oceanography, and the New York Academy. He died on March 18, 1993 in Amherst. Dean Bumpus, a former colleague from WHOI, was one of the participating speakers at his memorial service.