Henry Marion Howe was born on March 2, 1848, in Boston, Suffolk, Massachusetts.

He was an American metallurgist, educator, and author. He graduated from the Boston Latin School in 1865 and from Harvard College in 1869. In 1871, he graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (B.Sc.). He worked in the iron and then the copper industries in the U.S., Chile, Quebec, New Jersey, and Arizona from 1872 to 1882. From 1883 to 1897, he was a consulting metallurgist in Boston, and simultaneously a lecturer at M.I.T. In 1897, he became a chair in metallurgy at Columbia University. He wrote the books "Copper Smelting" (1885), "The Metallurgy of Steel" (1891), "Iron, Steel, and Other Alloys" (1903), "The Metallography of Steel and Cast Iron" (1916), and the "Iron and Steel" article for the Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed. (1911). He received the Bessemer Gold Medal of the Iron and Steel Institute (1895), Elliott Cresson Medal of the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia (1895), and John Fritz Gold Medal of the American Association of Engineering Societies (1917). Howe was elected president of the American Institute of Mining Engineers in 1893, and chairman of the American Society for Testing Materials in 1900. He became a member of the National Research Council in 1918 and its chairman in 1919.

He married Fannie Gay (1851-1926). He died on May 14, 1922, in Bedford Hills, Westchester, New York.