Henry Clinton Fall

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Henry Clinton Fall (December 25, 1862 – November 14, 1939) was an American entomologist who studied insects, especially beetles. He was born in Farmington, New Hampshire, and died in Tyngsboro, Massachusetts.

He earned his bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College in 1884. From 1884 to 1889 he taught math and physics in Chicago high schools. In 1889 he moved to Southern California for health reasons and taught physical sciences at Pasadena High School from 1889 to 1917, leading the physical sciences department for about 25 years.

A visit from George Henry Horn inspired Fall to study insects, and in 1893 he wrote an article on beetles. He published revisions of several beetle families and created lists of species known from the California Channel Islands and southern California. He was one of the first researchers to study the insects of the Channel Islands, especially beetles.

In 1917 he retired to Tyngsboro, Massachusetts, about 26 miles from Cambridge. He continued to identify and curate insect specimens and published his last paper in 1937. He gathered about 250,000 specimens, described 1,484 species, and wrote 144 publications. Dartmouth College awarded him an honorary PhD in 1929. He died in Massachusetts in 1939. His insect collection and papers went to Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology.

Fall’s collection includes about 20,000 different insect species. He inspired many beetle experts, including Edwin Van Dyke and Frank Ellsworth Blaisdell. Dover High School in Dover, New Hampshire, has a scholarship in his name. The first winner was Madigan Jennison-Henderson in 2021.