Thomas W. Macquarrie (1879-1963), was born in Ontario, Canada, and attended normal school and taught for a time in Wisconsin. He then served as a principal of a private boy’s school. At the time of World War I, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, rising to the rank of major. After the war, he studied psychology at King’s College, London. Macquarrie then enrolled at Stanford University, earning his bachelor’s, master’s and PhD. in the space of four years. After a brief time at the University of Southern California, he became president of San Jose State College, serving in this capacity from 1927 until his retirement in 1952.
The “Macquarrie Test for Mechanical Ability” is based on his dissertation work. It is a group performance test designed for the use of school counselors and personnel managers. This example, copyrighted 1925, is a sixteen-page stapled pamphlet divided into seven subtests named tracing, tapping, dotting, copying, location, blocks, and pursuit.
The donor of the object, David Gold, worked as a personnel officer from the 1920s into the 1970s. In this capacity, he accumulated a variety of paper-and-pencil tests which he donated to the Smithsonian in 1989. This is one of them.
References:
T. W. Macquarrie, “A Measure of Mechanical Ability,” PhD. Dissertation. Stanford University, 1924.
T. W. Macquarrie, “A Mechanical Ability Test,” Journal of Personnel Research, January 1927.
“Dr. MacQuarrie’s Funeral Today,” Spartan Daily, November 18, 1963, p. 1.
Accession File.
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