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Edmund L. Zalinski

Army Officer/Engineer/Inventor

Centurion, 1890–1909

Full Name Edmund Louis Gray Zalinski

Born 13 December 1849 in Kórnik, Poland

Died 11 March 1909 in Rochester, New York

Buried Mount Hope Cemetery, Rochester, New York

Proposed by Peter S. Michie and William Conant Church

Elected 7 June 1890 at age forty

Century Memorial

Edmund Louis Gray Zalinski was a Pole by birth, but came to America in early childhood and was educated at Seneca Falls and Syracuse up to the age of fifteen, when he entered the army, served to the close of the Civil War, and then, as an officer in the regular army, adopted the profession he had learned so thoroughly in the field as his life work. He was first a lieutenant in the Fifth Artillery, then instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and afterwards in succession a graduate of our higher artillery school and of the school of submarine mining; he retired as captain in 1894 and was brevetted major in 1904. He will be remembered long for his inventions, which were, in the main, weapons and means of defense; but, being novel and almost revolutionary in warfare, they aroused great interest. He was a man much beloved for his sweetness of character: having many friends and catholic interests; he belonged to many clubs. But it was with us that he spent most of his leisure, here that he found his home. As his life waned and he was sorely tried with sorrow and pain, his gentle heroism and undaunted courage were remarkable. He had been nineteen years a member when he died at sixty [sic: fifty-nine].

William Milligan Sloane
1910 Century Association Yearbook