H. B. Maris received his A.B. degree in 1910 and in 1911 an M.S. in forestry from the University of Michigan. In 1927, Maris received his Ph.D. in physics and mathematics from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. From July 1918-April 1919, he served in the U.S. Army at Camp Abraham, Williamsburg, Virginia as an electrician/carpenter. Later, he worked at the Bethlehem Steel Company of Baltimore as an electrician/laboratory technician, taught at Birmingham Southern College in Alabama as an instructor in the fields of physics and mathematics, and became a professor of physics, mathematics, and astronomy at Emory and Henry College in Virginia where he remained until June 1925. It was in that year that Maris began his long association with the Navy Department as a physicist stationed at the Naval Research Laboratory, Anacostia station, where he was eventually promoted to the rank of associate physicist. After leaving the Naval Research Laboratory in 1942, he undertook the position of general researcher in weather forecasting at the David Taylor Model Basin.