Engineer/inventor. Based out of Illinois but the above news article places him in Los Angeles in 1905. There in the west to demonstrate his new invention (described in the above article; having to do with making compasses more accurate).
The note about Mayan Stela 11 (in the proportional divider case that I purchased with Herrickās name) I contend, is still some discovery he made about Mayan support columns (called Stelae [plural] or Stela [singular]). Nobody would have dialed-in such a precise pivot point ending in .25 without immense purpose.