Lee Dubridge Was Invited to the University of Rochester, Which Recently Had Been Heavily Endowed by George Eastman
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NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES L E E A L V I N D U B RID G E 1901—1994 A Biographical Memoir by J E S S E L . GREENSTEIN Any opinions expressed in this memoir are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Academy of Sciences. Biographical Memoir COPYRIGHT 1997 NATIONAL ACADEMIES PRESS WASHINGTON D.C. Courtesy of The White House, Washington, D.C. LEE ALVIN DUBRIDGE September 21, 1901–January 23, 1994 BY JESSE L. GREENSTEIN EE A. DUBRIDGE WAS born in Terre Haute, Indiana, on LSeptember 21, 1901; he died of pneumonia at age ninety- two in a retirement home in Duarte, California, on January 23, 1994. To quote the memoir by John D. Roberts and Harold Brown, DuBridge was “one of the most influential American scientists of the 20th century. He was a first-rate physicist, a leader in research of immense importance to the Allied victory in World War II, an exemplary research university president in a time of enormous scientific, soci- etal, and educational change, as well as an influential states- man for science in the postwar era.”1 Lee directed the MIT radar lab (1940-45), was president of Caltech (1946-69), and advised the government and mili- tary throughout his long career. He received the King’s Medal for Service in the Cause of Freedom, the U.S. Medal for Merit, and the Vannevar Bush Award of the National Science Foundation. The Caltech trustees established the Lee Alvin DuBridge professorship.2 I will not attempt to describe his full career. He was a modest, eminently likable man, small in stature, but with strong presence. His conversation ranged from reminiscences 89 90 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS of great world scientific events and personal friends to the finances of KCET, the Los Angeles PBS station, which he helped found and served as president of its board. He loved opera and made and listened to shelves-full of video re- cordings of nearly all broadcast performances. I will em- phasize his life and personality at the expense of his scien- tific accomplishments, which came early. YOUTH For his family Lee wrote both professional and personal autobiographies of great interest. He deposited one copy, which I have used, in the Caltech archives. It reflects a difficult, poor childhood with many moves and no perma- nent home. His father, who changed jobs frequently, was a YMCA secretary, football coach, and physical education di- rector at YMCA camps in Iowa, California, Montana, and Michigan, as well as in the Army. Later his circumstances worsened, and he taught, ran a filling station, sold insur- ance, and after the Depression returned to YMCA work in Chicago. Lee’s mother was a poet and writer, who during the Depression wrote poems for greeting cards, some of which are still in use. The Caltech archives has a slender book of her work. Perhaps it was from her that he inherited his fondness for music. Lee earned whatever money a young boy could; at age sixteen he worked in a Union Carbide laboratory for fifty cents an hour. Nevertheless, he had a good high school education in Sault Ste. Marie. He was somewhat interested in chemistry, but found it monotonous as taught. With small savings and a minuscule scholarship he started at Cornell College in Iowa in 1918. He was a good student but showed little early concentrated interest in science. He lived on a scholarship plus the thirty dollars a month he earned as a waiter in a girls’ dormitory. There he met his wife-to-be, LEE ALVIN DUBRIDGE 91 Doris Koht. Doris followed him through his career and proved a capable president’s wife and hostess at Caltech. Doris died in 1973. At Cornell he attracted the interest of the physicist O. H. Smith, to whom Lee was long grateful. Lee took advanced work in physics and served as laboratory assistant. Cornell was a small school but had devoted teachers. Smith later received the Oersted Medal for teaching from the Ameri- can Association of Physics Teachers. Lee had a few years of study and normal student activities (debate, Milton, and singing in oratorios and church choirs), and was president of the student YMCA. He graduated in 1922 with a Phi Beta Kappa and went to the University of Wisconsin for graduate study. At the University of Wisconsin he was awarded a Ph.D. in 1926 (and later received one of his twenty-eight honor- ary degrees). The physics department was small and conge- nial and strongly emphasized laboratory work, use of vacuum, and measurement of small currents. Lee had a summer job with the Bell Telephone Lab with future Nobelist Clinton Davisson. Supported by fellowships at Madison, Lee studied the photoelectric effect from plati- num surfaces in which light (photons) causes the emission of charge (electrons) from metallic surfaces. Some photon energy must be expended to remove the electrons from the solid, depending on the material and its surface finish. His first assigned text was Arnold Sommerfeld’s new text Atombau und Spektrallinien in German, taught by Charles E. Mendenhall. Sommerfeld himself visited two years later. Other instructors included Warren Weaver and Max Mason (with whom Lee had many later contacts). Lee’s first important experiment (published in Physical Review) proved that positive ions were definitely not emit- ted during the photoelectric process. Lee spent fifteen years on the photoelectric effect, building all apparatus required 92 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS to perform experiments of increasing delicacy and preci- sion. His thesis provided values of the photoelectric thresh- olds. With his Ph.D. and appointment as instructor (at $1,800 per year) he could at last afford marriage to Doris Koht, on September 1, 1925. Their two children were Barbara Lee (born 1931, and who married David MacLeod in 1955) and Richard Alvin (born 1933). Lee received an offer of a Na- tional Research Council fellowship for 1926-28 at $2,000 per year to work at Caltech under Robert A. Millikan. That great figure in American physics repeatedly became Lee’s sponsor during his career. The family bought a car, without a trunk ($400) and drove it across country in 1926, camping for six weeks as they explored the scenery, campgrounds, and treacherous roads of the Mid- and Far West. For thirty-five dollars a month they rented a bungalow in Pasadena. Such details of Lee’s early career show how much has changed from the way physics was done in pre-war America. Yet in the next ten years things really did not change much. With my middle- class background, I received an NRC fellowship at $2,200 per year in 1937 and drove with my wife from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Williams Bay, Wisconsin, in my first car (a Ford that cost $400). My house rented for forty dollars a month. Yet in Madison, 60 miles distant, photoelectric as- tronomy was being created by astronomer Joel Stebbins and physicist Albert Whitford. Science in the United States was only a small community and had a quite penurious support system. At Caltech Lee continued to work on the photoelectric effect with Millikan, who was first to verify Einstein’s rela- tion between the photon energy and the maximum energy of the ejected electrons. Millikan befriended all young fac- ulty, which he viewed as a big, happy family with himself as genial, strict father. They had many talks about the short LEE ALVIN DUBRIDGE 93 history of Caltech, the philosophy of leadership in science, and the overriding necessity to attract the best people in every field of teaching and research. Caltech had such dis- tinguished physicists as Richard C. Tolman, Paul S. Epstein, and students like Clark Millikan, Charles Richter, William V. Houston, and the humanist Clinton Judy. In a far better laboratory with an ultraviolet spectrometer, better vacuum, measuring instruments, and electronics, Lee studied the parallelism of the thermionic and photoelectric emission processes. In 1928 Lee was invited to Washington University in St. Louis as assistant professor. Chairman Arthur Hughes wel- comed him and soon proposed collaboration on a book. Much early work is consequently discussed in two books, Photoelectric Phenomena with Arthur L. Hughes (1932), which became a bible for experimenters, and New Theories of the Photoelectric Effect (1935). On the theoretical front, R. H. Fowler had just found that free electrons in solids obeyed Fermi-Dirac statistics; Lee’s experiments in St. Louis pro- vided many tests, measuring the photon frequency and the temperature dependence of the ejected electrons. Finally, nearing the end of his photoelectric work, he developed a Brown-DuBridge amplifier that proved useful for many years. But changes were coming even at the bottom of the Great Depression. LEADERSHIP In 1934 an important change occurred in his career. Lee DuBridge was invited to the University of Rochester, which recently had been heavily endowed by George Eastman. At age thirty-three he had not only become a full professor but department head as well. His salary reached $5,500 as his work and influence changed. He brought Fred Seitz 94 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS and Milton Plesset to Rochester; he helped rescue Victor Weisskopf from Hitler’s Europe. An abrupt shift to the new subject of nuclear physics was stimulated by the success of Ernest O. Lawrence’s cyclo- tron. The change marked the relatively inexpensive begin- ning of “big science” in which many people collaborated. They had invaluable advice from Lawrence and Cooksey of Berkeley. DuBridge led a group of physicists and a strong group of electrical engineers at Rochester, who borrowed metal for the magnets, got electrical generating equipment and high-power vacuum tube oscillators free, and raised $4,000 from local philanthropists for cash outlay.