- Person
- Albert A. Michelson
- Lived
- 1852–1931
- Field
- Optics
- From
- Prussian-born American
The story
By the early 1890s Albert Michelson was already one of the best-known experimental physicists in the United States. After teaching at the U.S. Naval Academy, he had spent nearly a decade as professor of physics at the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, where he and Edward Morley carried out their celebrated aether experiment in 1887, and in 1890 he moved to Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.
In 1892 he was recruited by the newly organised University of Chicago, which was building its faculty from scratch. He became professor of physics and the first head of its Department of Physics, a post he held until his retirement in 1929. Over those years he built the department into one of the leading centres of physics in the United States.
Chicago gave him the freedom to pursue precision optics. He invented the echelon spectroscope there, and in the 1890s, with S. W. Stratton, he built a mechanical harmonic analyser that computed the coefficients of Fourier series and drew graphs of their partial sums; the two described the machine in the American Journal of Science in 1898. He also published his lectures as Light Waves and Their Uses, one of several books that brought his methods to a wider audience.
His Chicago years brought his greatest honours. He was serving at the university when he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1907, the first American to win a Nobel in the sciences. During the First World War, in his sixties, he rejoined the Navy as a reserve officer with the Bureau of Ordnance and developed an optical rangefinder that was adopted as Navy equipment. He returned to Chicago in 1918, and in 1925 he was appointed to one of the university's first Distinguished Service Professorships.
In his later years Michelson's interests turned towards astronomy. Working at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California, he measured the diameter of the star Betelgeuse in 1920, and he carried out a famous measurement of the speed of light there in the mid-1920s. He resigned from Chicago in 1929 to continue his work at Mount Wilson and died in Pasadena in 1931.
The University of Chicago honours him with Michelson House in its residence halls, and in 2017 it renamed a newly renovated physics research centre in his name.
Why it matters
Michelson made Chicago a home for world-class experimental physics and showed that a young American university could compete with the great laboratories of Europe.
About Albert A. Michelson
Physicist who measured the speed of light with unmatched precision, performed the Michelson–Morley experiment and in 1907 became the first American to win a Nobel Prize in science.
More about Albert A. Michelson
- Michelson measured the metre in wavelengths of lightIn 1892–93 in Paris, Albert Michelson measured the international prototype metre in wavelengths of cadmium's red light, showing a unit of length could be defined by nature.
- Michelson's interferometer now detects gravitational wavesThe interferometer Albert Michelson invented in 1881 became one of physics' most important instruments; the LIGO detectors that first caught gravitational waves in 2015 are Michelson interferometers.
- Michelson measured the size of a star for the first timeIn 1920 Albert Michelson and Francis Pease measured the diameter of the red giant Betelgeuse, the first time the size of any star other than the Sun had been measured.
- Michelson's famous null result paved the way for relativityIn 1887 Albert Michelson and Edward Morley found no trace of the supposed "aether", a result that became one of the classic foundations of Einstein's theory of relativity.
- Michelson timed light across 22 miles of CaliforniaUsing a 22-mile light path between Mount Wilson and Mount San Antonio, Albert Michelson measured the speed of light in 1926 as 299,796 kilometres per second, plus or minus 4.
- A young naval officer measured light's speed in 1879In June and July 1879, Albert Michelson, a 26-year-old instructor at the U.S. Naval Academy, measured the speed of light as 299,910 kilometres per second, far more accurately than anyone before.
Sources
- Albert A. Michelson Wikipedia
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