Gordon Battelle

Gordon Battelle (10 August 1883 – 21 September 1923) was the founder of Battelle Memorial Institute, a non-profit independent research and development organization.

Gordon Battelle was born in Covington, Kentucky, to Ohio industrialist Colonel John Gordon Battelle (1845-1918) and his wife Annie Maude Battelle née Norton (1865-1925). He was named for his grandfather, prominent Methodist minister Gordon Battelle, who had helped found the state of West Virginia before dying of disease as a chaplain in the American Civil War. John Gordon Battelle had become a pioneer in the steel industry as owner of Columbus Iron & Steel Company. His wife, Annie Maude Norton Battelle, was a suffragette. They married in Memphis, Tennessee in 1881, where John Gordon Battelle had moved from Wheeling, West Virginia to establish an iron manufacturing company. The family moved to the Cincinnati, Ohio metropolitan area (which includes Covington) as John Gordon Battelle established the Piqua Rolling Mill Company and the Cincinnati Corrugating Company. In 1905, the family moved to Columbus, Ohio in 1905, where John Gordon Battelle died in 1918. Annie Maude Norton Battelle died in March 1925 (outliving her son Gordon by two years).

As the only son of John and Annie Battelle, Gordon was trained to inherit and manage his father's holdings in the steel industry. He attended military school in Chester, Pennsylvania, and later studied metallurgy at the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University.

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