Stoelting, the Chicago firm that made this set of discrimination weights, associated them with Gilbert and Whipple. Joshua Allen Gilbert (1867-1948) was a graduate of Otterbein University who, while working towards a psychology PhD from Yale University, devised experiments to illustrate the presumed correspondence between intelligence and the ability to discriminate between different weights. Gilbert later became a surgeon, and performed a hysterectomy on Alberta Lucille Hart, the first documented transgender male transition in the United States. He was also famous for attempting to communicate with his dead wife. Guy Montrose Whipple (1876-1941) was an educational psychologist with a PhD from Cornell University.
Ref: J. A. Gilbert, “Researches on the Mental and Physical Development of School-Children,” Studies from the Yale Psychological Laboratory 2 (1894): 43-45, 59-63.
“Dr. Joshua A. Gilbert,” New York Times (April 20, 1948), p. 27.
Guy Montrose Whipple, Manual of Mental and Physical Tests (Baltimore, 1914), pp. 223-230.
