A Washburn professor who held the chair in physics and chemistry, Joseph Taplin Lovewell is remembered as the first man to place a phone call across the Mississippi River. A friend of Alexander Graham Bell, Lovewell was given a pair of phones in 1877 to demonstrate the coming revolution in communication.
A news story about a get-together between the professor and his cousin Thomas Lovewell in 1902 was carried in a number of Kansas papers.