by John N. Howard

As I sat down to breakfast one morning in 1980, I opened the Boston Globe and was astonished to see an entry in the obituaries stating that the optical scientist Peter Franken had died in Bedford, Mass., the day before. The article gave a detailed history of Franken: his study at Columbia University under Polykarp Kusch; his nearly 20 years of teaching at the University of Michigan; his stint in the Defense Department working in laser optics at ARPA (The Advance Research Projects Agency); and then his later work at the University of Arizona. Based on these details, I concluded that this must certainly be OSA’s own Peter Franken—but why was his demise listed as having taken place in Bedford, where I have lived and worked since the mid-1950s, when Franken had been based in Tucson?

I telephoned the OSA office in Washington, and the staff there were similarly astonished. Someone there called the Optical Sciences Center in Tucson. Much to our relief, we found out that Peter Franken had not died after all; he was still very much alive and well, and not at all eager to attend a funeral, especially his own.

It seems that the OSA Peter Franken, of Tucson, had a cousin of about the same age, also named Peter Franken, who worked in optics for a defense contractor in Bedford, and that cousin had indeed died. The Boston Globe, like its sister paper The New York Times, maintains biographical files on many well-known people, including some optical researchers. When they received the news that a Peter Franken had died, someone in their death notices department added the Tucson Franken’s biographical information on file to the obituary of the unfortunate Bedford scientist. The Tucson Franken was very sorry to hear of the departure of his cousin, but he was also pleased to report to his friends and associates that the reports of his death had been very much exaggerated!

The real Peter Franken (of Tucson), who was President of OSA in 1977, and later Director of the Optical Sciences Center, 1973-83, did indeed die several years later, at the age of 70, in Tucson on 11 Mar 1999. In the memorial notices that were then published, chiefly at the Universities of Michigan and Arizona, his substantial contributions to laser optics were cited. Also remarked upon were examples of his outrageous humor and carefully prepared pranks.

John N. Howard (johnnelsonhoward@gmail.com) is the founding editor of Applied Optics and retired chief scientist of the Air Force Geophysics Laboratory.

Optics History, OSA History, Physics History John Howard, Peter Franken, OSA President

By John N. Howard, OPN Contributing Editor

The May issue of Optics & Photonics News includes a profile that traces the fascinating life of Art Schawlow, Nobel laureate and former OSA president, as well as a history of the journal Applied Optics and how it came to publish some of the seminal papers on early laser development. This post explores where the two stories intersect...

In 1959 the Board of Directors of OSA decided that OSA should have a full-time executive secretary working in an executive office located in Washington, D.C. Professor Mary Warga of the University of Pittsburgh was recruited to fill that role. She was nearing retirement age from the physics department at Pittsburgh, and she looked forward with much enthusiasm to her new duties at OSA. A year later, in the fall of 1960, the OSA Board also voted to launch a new OSA journal, Applied Optics. The hope was that it would capture some of the interdisciplinary papers related to optics that did not seem to be flowing to the Journal of the Optical Society of America (JOSA).

Mary Warga introduced a new, one-page column, “From the Executive Office,” in JOSA, and she also began a program of visiting research centers that were oriented toward optics, to inform those researchers about OSA and to try to persuade those workers to join OSA and submit their research papers to JOSA and AO. One of the laboratories she visited in her first year at OSA was Bell Telephone Laboratories, which included a very distinguished research group located in Murrey Hill, N.J., U.S.A. When she visited there in 1960, her host was a bright young spectroscopist with a strong background in optics. His name was Arthur Schawlow.

Arthur Schawlow was born in suburban New York in 1921. His father was an emigrant from Latvia to America, and his mother was Canadian. When Arthur was three years old, the family moved to Toronto, where Arthur attended public schools, and then (at age 16) the University of Toronto. He originally thought he would be an engineer, but then he settled into physics. Presumably, he took the optics course offered by Professor W. E.K. Middleton. (Middleton was very active in OSA, and had served on the OSA Board of Directors. In 1933, Middleton had been the Ives Medalist of OSA.) After graduating with a bachelor’s degree from Toronto; Schawlow remained there for his graduate study. His thesis advisor was Malcolm Crawford, a spectroscopist.

Following his Ph.D. at Toronto, Schawlow served a post-doctoral fellowship at Columbia University, working under Charles Townes. He then joined Bell Labs in 1951.

So, when Mary Warga visited Bell Labs in 1960; Arthur Schawlow was a kind, sympathetic host. He immediately joined OSA and promised to urge several of his colleagues also to join. Futhermore, he promised Mary Warga that his group would submit a paper for the inaugural issue of Applied Optics. Mary returned to Washington following her visit to Murray Hill very pleased with the success of her visit. Schawlow became active in OSA and later served as president of OSA. He also went on to share a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1981 with Nicolaas Bloembergen. Schawlow is the only Nobel laureate to have also served as OSA president.  

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In his previous post and the one before that, John Howard explored the history of blackbody radiation. Here, he describes how Max Planck was persuaded to derive a formula for blackbody radiation. Planck presented his formula in December of 1900 to the German Physical Society in Berlin, ushering in the quantum era.

In the late summer of 1900, Otto Lummer and Ernst Pringsheim carefully measured the spectral distribution of the thermal radiation from a blackbody radiator, and H. Rubens and his colleague Kurlbaum made a similar set of measurements at various temperatures. They then plotted their results and compared the results with the two theoretical predictions—of Wilhelm Wien for high frequencies, and Lord Rayleigh for lower frequencies. They found good agreement with the Wien formula, except that the Rayleigh formula was definitely better at low frequencies.

I have read two different accounts of how H. Rubens related to the young thermodynamicist Max Planck that the Wien formula did not fit well at low frequencies. According to one story, Rubens attended a seminar at the University of Berlin shortly after plotting his data.  At the tea and social hour before the event, he saw Planck, joined him for tea, and reported his results. In the other version, Planck invited Rubens and his wife to a Sunday lunch at Planck’s home; after their meal, the two physicists discussed the partial failure of the Wien formula.

Planck was indeed very interested, as less than a year earlier he had carefully worked to put Wien’s derivation of his formula on to a more solid thermodynamic foundation. After the seminar (or the lunch) was over, Planck spent the rest of that day looking for an “interpolation formula” that would reduce to the Rayleigh prediction at low frequencies, and to the Wien formulation at higher frequencies.

After several hours, he succeeded in finding such a formula. It was generally similar to the Wien formulation, but with an additional exponential term in the denominator. He sent a note with his proposed formula to Rubens, who returned to Planck two days later and said that interpolation formula fits everything, so it must be right! Planck said later that finding that formula was “just a lucky guess.”

 At a Berlin meeting of the German Physical Society in mid-October of 1900, Kurlbaum gave a short paper on the Rubens-Kurlbaum measurements, following which Planck arose with some comments and sketched his modified formula on the blackboard. The attendees were pleased with this ad hoc formula; now Planck was faced with the more daunting challenge of producing a satisfactory scientific derivation of that “interpolation formula.” Planck labored over that derivation for about two months, calling it the “hardest labor of my life,” before presenting his detailed derivation to a meeting of the Physical Society in mid-December 1900.

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By John Howard

Prompted by the recent OPN article about Lord Rayleigh and Otto Lummer, John wrote his previous post on the early history of blackbody radiation. Here, he picks up where he left off in that history--in 19th century America and the work of Thomas Edison.

In the United States, a bright, hard-working young Thomas Edison with a knack towards invention had taught himself telegraphy. In 1869, when he was 22, had applied for a job at a brokerage firm in New York City.  While he was waiting to be interviewed, the stock ticker broke down, and he was the only one who knew how to fix it. He was immediately hired—and at a better wage than he had expected.

Within a year, he had designed a much improved stock ticker, and he sold his model to the firm for $40,000. With this money, he bought a building near Newark, N.J.; hired two or three assistants; and began a lifelong career of practical inventions. Of his early inventions, he was most proud of the phonograph. In 1878, at the age of 31, he announced that he was turning his attention toward designing an electric light. In his laboratory in Menlo Park, he worked as much as 20 hours a day.

Edison and his assistants tried hundreds of filaments, until finally, in October 1879, he had a light bulb with a carbon filament that successfully stayed lit for 40 hours. (His team then turned to other materials for filaments, and ultimately settled on tungsten.)

With the invention of the electric light bulb, many scientists and engineers turned their attention to the radiation from lamp filaments and hot incandescent bodies. The General Electric Company began a laboratory at Nela Park in Cleveland for its lamp division, and blackbody radiation was a primary research subject. In Germany, the Siemans company urged the German government to found the Physicalische-Techniche Reichsanstalt (PTR) and even donated a building and land near Berlin University to house that research organization.

In 1887 Hermann Helmholtz joined the PTR as its first director, bringing with him his assistant Otto Lummer, who headed the research effort on blackbody radiation. Lummer constructed a heated sphere with a small hole to emit blackbody radiation, and, in the late summer of 1900, he and Pringsheim studied blackbody radiation over a wide variety of temperatures. Working with them was a young graduate student, Heinrich Rubens of the University of Berlin, a guest worker at PTR.

In early 1900, Lord Rayleigh turned his attention to the problem of blackbody radiation. He was an expert in acoustics, and he had many times calculated the formation of acoustic standing waves in a resonant cavity; why not try that same approach to standing waves of blackbody radiation in a blackbody cavity? He counted up all the possible standing waves, assumed that there was an equal probability for each to occur, and that each standing wave represented an energy of kT of radiation.

When he then calculated the total blackbody radiation, he found to his surprise that he disagreed by a factor of eight with the published value calculated by Wien. He nevertheless published his calculation. He promptly received a note from a bright young Cambridge graduate, James Jeans, who said that he thought Rayleigh had only counted the number of possible standing waves in one octant of the possible directions of x, y, z; he should have counted from minus infinity to plus infinity for the entire range of standing waves. Rayleigh agreed with Jeans immediately, and dropped a note to Nature, renaming his Rayleigh distribution to the more proper Rayleigh-Jeans distribution of standing waves.

The bright young Jeans now had his name linked to the much better known physicist Lord Rayleigh. However, even with this correction, the Rayleigh-Jeans equation appeared only to represent the true spectrum of blackbody radiation at long wavelengths (or low frequencies).

Then, in the late summer of 1900. . .

John’s next post will cover how the work of Lummer, Pringsheim, Planck, and others contributed to the development of an interpolation formula that would reduce to the Rayleigh prediction at low frequencies.

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by John N. Howard

In this month's History of OSA column in OPN, OSA's former executive director Jarus Quinn shares his reminiscences about the summer he spent cleaning out the lab of Robert W. Wood--and the explosive surprise he found when he used water clean out a bottle filled with sodium. Robert Wood was the famous and eccentric physicist who discovered resonance radiation and greatly expanded our understanding of ultraviolet light.

There were so many rememberances of R.W. Wood that the Hopkins types who had known him used to have dinner together at OSA or American Physical Society meetings just to relate some of their cherished anecdotes. I was not a Hopkins graduate (only an Ohio Stater), but even I attended at least one of those hilarious evenings. Many of those anecdotes were authenic, first-hand recollections of those who had known or worked with Wood; but most of the classic anecdotes came from the book Doctor Wood by William Seabrook.

Around 1908, Wood had bought a summer place in East Hampton, on Long Island; and Seabrook was a neighbor who had many interviews with Wood in the 1930s and 1940. His book was published in 1941 by Harcourt, Brace. So many of the classic anecdotes are from Seabrook (such as Wood tossing a bit of sodium into a puddle while he pretended to spit, thus awing some onlookers with the explosive results--a tale that Quinn also recounts in his OPN piece.)

Seabrook also gives an account of a visit Wood made to Lord Rayleigh's home in Essex in 1904--which will be featured in the October History of OSA column in OPN. I have read his book several times, and now I need to read it again, to refresh my own memory of Wood's exploits!  Wood enjoyed publicity, and he was often mentioned in the Baltimore Sun.  H.L. Mencken called Wood the  "Wild Man of Baltimore" (a spoof on the Wild Man of Borneo exhibited by Phineas T. Barnum).

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By John N. Howard, OPN Contributing Editor

A couple weeks ago, I introduced this blog by talking about OSA Honorary Member Albert Michelson, the first American to win a Nobel Prize in science (in 1907). He won that prize for his improved optical determination of the velocity of light.

For young people starting out in their careers, it can sometimes seem that optics luminaries such as Michelson were simply born to be stars. But, as the following story points out, Michelson had to work hard to make his start. In fact, he walked right into the Oval Office of the White House, and presented a plea directly to President Ulysses S. Grant.

Michelson was born in 1852 in Strelno, Prussia (now Strzelno, Poland).  When he was two years old, the family immigrated to America. They stayed a few weeks in New York City with some relatives. But the lure of the California Gold Rush caused Albert’s father, Samuel, to book passage to the West--by boat to Panama, then 50 miles across the Isthmus, and then again by boat to San Francisco.

They proceeded to Murphy’s Camp (about 150 miles east of San Francisco), where Samuel opened a store selling shovels, pick-axes and other supplies to the prospectors. Albert was sent to live with his father’s sister in San Francisco, where he attended the Boys High School, graduating in 1869. Meanwhile, Samuel moved his dry goods store to Virginia City, Nev., where the mining lure was now mostly silver.

The store was not prospering not well enough to think in terms of college for young Albert. In 1869, Samuel saw a notice in the paper announcing that Congressman Fitch of Nevada was authorized to appoint a candidate for the next class at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., U.S.A.

About a dozen young high school graduates applied, and the congressman selected a committee to screen the applicants.The committee eliminated all but Michelson and two others, whom they regarded as tied for first place. The congressman selected young James Blakely, whose family connections were the strongest, and whose father had lost an arm in the Civil War. (In those days, the sympathies of most Californians and Nevadans were almost completely with the Union.)  

Albert was very disappointed, but not ready to give up. He bought a ticket to Washington on the transatlantic railroad—which had only been operating for about a year—and made the three-day journey to Washington.

He then presented himself at the White House, telling a young military receptionist: “I want to see the President.”  “Do you have an appointment?,” she asked. Albert then showed her his letter stating that he had tied for first place to an appointment to Annapolis, but had just barely missed out. The receptionist let him go on in, followed by a young naval orderly, who remained in the back of the room.

President Grant looked up from some papers he was reading, and then listened as 16-year-old Albert told his story. Albert was a bright, handsome young man, and President Grant also had a son of about the same age. But, he said, there is little he could do; he had already filled the ten appointments-at-large that had been authorized to the White House. Albert left, trying to hide his disappointment. On the way out the young Naval orderly said he should go to Annapolis, just in case any of the approved appointments had failed their entrance exams.

So on Albert went to Annapolis, and asked to see the Superintendent. It was three days before the Superintendant saw him.  He was told that there were no vacancies; but the Superintendant asked an examining officer to talk to Albert. After that interview a disappointed Albert returned to Washington, and the next morning boarded the train for the return trip to Nevada.

Just before the train was scheduled to leave, a military orderly walked through the train, calling his name, and brought him back to the White House. The interviewer at Annapolis had sent a message to the White House that Michelson appeared to have genuine talent; and President Grant had relented and approved Albert as an additional appointment!

In later years, Michelson liked to tell that story, and he chuckled that he had begun his career with an “illegal act,” since President Grant made an additional appointment beyond his authorized number.

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By John N. Howard, OPN Contributing Editor

In physics history, we associate several events with sudden insight by the discoverer. The most famous such event was perhaps when King Hiero of Syracuse (308-215 B.C.E) received a new crown, fashioned by a goldsmith, and Hiero had asked his science adviser Archimedes how could one check that the crown was really solid gold, and not merely a thin layer of gold over some cheaper material. Archimedes was supposedly pondering this problem when he went for a soak in a public bath, filled to the brim with water. As he got into the bath, some water sloshed out, and he suddenly realized that he could determine the density of that golden crown by measuring how much water it displaced when immersed. He already knew that pure gold should be eight times as heavy as water.

According to the story—or, perhaps, the myth—Archimedes then happily ran back to his house —naked—shouting “Eureka!” (“I have found it!”). 

Image from Wikimedia Commons. It shows how Archimedes may have used buoyancy to determine whether his crown was less dense than gold.

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