Br. Potamian

Shortly after his birth, Brother Potamian's family moved to New York, settling in the Tompkins Square section of the East Side where he was one of the first boys registered at St. Brigid's School. He entered the Brothers in 1858 and after his novitiate began teaching in the schools of Canada, in Quebec and Montreal. It was at the Commercial Academy in Quebec where he taught while he studied for his Teacher's Diploma and where he first took to writing articles for periodicals, a practice he kept up to the end of his career. In 1868 he was assigned to Christian Brothers College in St. Louis, Missouri. He remained there until 1870 when he left for St. Joseph's College, London. There he received his Bachelor's degree in 1878, his Master's in 1880, and his Doctor of Science degree from the University of London in 1883. It would be twenty five years (1896) before Brother Potamian, who after serving in a variety of schools and colleges in England, would return to New York, to teach at Manhattan College and where he was to spend the next twenty-one years of his teaching career. He became the first Dean of the School of Engineering at Manhattan College. Marconi thought him equally competent in his particular field of "wireless" to share his lecture schedule with him. The British Government appointed him its official representative of the Empire at four succeeding International Expositions held in Vienna (1873), Philadelphia (1876), Paris (1889), and at the Columbian Exposition in 1893 in Chicago, Illinois. He was credited with being the first person to take an X-ray for medical purposes in 1895 in Ireland. He was fluent in Latin, French, German and Spanish. He died at Manhattan College on January 20, 1917, when nearing his seventy-first birthday and in his fifty-eighth year as a De La Salle Christian Brother.