Miller received the Bachelor of Philosophy degree in 1886 from Baldwin College (now Baldwin Wallace University). He took a Master of Arts degree there in 1889.
Gallery of Dayton Miller
Princeton, NJ 08544, United States
Miller began graduate work in astronomy under Charles A. Young at Princeton University. He received the Doctor of Science degree in 1890 with a thesis on the orbit and elements of Comet 1889.
Career
Gallery of Dayton Miller
1921
Cleveland, Ohio, United States
Head and shoulders portrait of Dayton C. Miller.
Gallery of Dayton Miller
1922
Cleveland, Ohio, United States
Dayton C. Miller with Flute, circa 1922.
Achievements
Membership
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
1914 - 1941
Dayton Clarence Miller was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
American Philosophical Society
1919 - 1941
Dayton Clarence Miller was a member of the American Philosophical Society.
National Academy of Sciences
1921 - 1941
Dayton Clarence Miller was a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
American Physical Society
1918 - 1941
Dayton Clarence Miller was a member of the American Physical Society.
National Research Council
1927 - 1930
Dayton Clarence Miller was a member of the National Research Council.
Acoustical Society of America
1931 - 1933
Dayton Clarence Miller was a member of the Acoustical Society of America.
Miller received the Bachelor of Philosophy degree in 1886 from Baldwin College (now Baldwin Wallace University). He took a Master of Arts degree there in 1889.
Miller began graduate work in astronomy under Charles A. Young at Princeton University. He received the Doctor of Science degree in 1890 with a thesis on the orbit and elements of Comet 1889.
Dayton Clarence Miller was an American physicist, astronomer, acoustician. Miller was an advocate of aether theory and absolute space and an opponent of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.
Background
Dayton Clarence Miller was born on March 13, 1866, on his father's farm in Strongsville, Ohio. He was the oldest of the four sons and one daughter of Charles Webster Dewey Miller and Vienna Pomeroy, both of New England descent. When he was eight, his father gave up farming and moved to Berea, Ohio, where he prospered as a hardware merchant and the organizer of a street railway. His parents were both musical his mother was a church organist and his father sang in the choir and Miller as a boy was strongly interested in both music and astronomy, playing the organ and flute and building his own telescopes.
Education
Miller attended public schools and the German Methodist Sunday school. After receiving the Bachelor of Philosophy degree in 1886 from Baldwin College (now Baldwin Wallace University) in Berea, he began a graduate work in astronomy under Charles A. Young at Princeton University. This study was interrupted by a year's teaching at Baldwin, where he took a Master of Arts degree in 1889. Returning to Princeton, he received the Doctor of Science degree in 1890 with a thesis on the orbit and elements of Comet 1889.
In 1890 Miller joined the faculty of the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland as an instructor of mathematics. He transferred to the physics department in 1893. He remained at Case as a professor of physics until his death.
Keenly interested in the physics of musical tones, Miller invented what he called the phonodeik in 1908, a mechanical device that recorded sound patterns photographically. During World War I, he used the apparatus to analyze the nature of gun wave-forms for the National Research Council, which was developing improved techniques to locate enemy artillery by sonic means. After the war Miller became an expert in architectural acoustics, consulting on the interior design of a number of college chapels as well as Severance Hall the home of the Cleveland Orchestra.
As a research physicist, Miller was best known for his elaborate repetitions of the experiment that Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley had performed with an interferometer in 1887 to detect the stationary luminiferous ether postulated by Maxwell. Miller did the experiment in collaboration with Morley between 1902 and 1904. Repeating it by himself on Mt. Wilson, California, between 1921 and 1926, he found a positive effect corresponding to the apparent relative motion of the earth and the ether of some ten kilometers per second in the plane of the interferometer. Though this velocity was about 70 percent less than expected, Miller fastened on his result as a refutation of Einstein’s theory of relativity, which he was unwilling to accept on principle to the end of his life.
When Miller presented his data in 1925, he provoked considerable interest among physicists and was awarded a $1,000 annual prize by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Anti-relativists hailed his findings; relativists believed that they probably rested on experimental error. In the 1950s a group of physicists subjected Miller’s Mt. Wilson data to statistical analysis. They found that only part of his positive readings could be attributed to random fluctuations. The rest seemed to result from an appreciable systematic effect whose magnitude varied with the conditions of observation. The cause of this effect appeared to be the large temperature changes which undoubtedly occurred in the poorly insulated shack that housed Miller’s apparatus atop Mt. Wilson.
Miller carried out research in optics in collaboration with Edward W. Morley. In 1904, they repeated the Michelson-Morley "ether drift" experiment of 1887, which had sought to test the theory that a medium (called "ether") filled outer space and was the means by which light was transmitted. After the apparent confirmation of Einstein's general theory of relativity by the solar eclipse expeditions of 1919, Miller was encouraged to repeat the Michelson-Morley-Miller experiment at a high elevation, and in 1921, on the invitation of George E. Hale, he went to the Mount Wilson Observatory. Observations were difficult in the lightweight laboratory hut, but with his superb experimental skill, Miller was able to obtain a vast amount of data for many sidereal epochs during an entire year, 1925-26. His results revealed anomalous periodic shifts of the interference fringes, which he interpreted as evidence for the existence of an ether. Computer analysis of this great body of data after Miller's death proved that although the shifts were statistically significant, they were not due to an ether-drift but rather to very small temperature gradients across the interferometer which displaced the fringes. When Miller's data were reanalyzed to take account of this temperature factor, they were shown to support the postulates of the special theory of relativity.
Miller's most important research, however, stemmed directly from his lifelong devotion to music. Seeking to determine how the physical characteristics of a tone were related to its musical qualities, he developed (1908) a very precise instrument, called the phonodeik ("to show sound"), to record sound waves photographically. To analyze the photographic records of tones produced by musical instruments, especially the flute, he developed harmonic analyzers and synthesizers of high precision. He used the same methods to determine the characteristics of vowel sounds and showed for the first time that their character depends upon the resonance frequency of specific air volumes in the head and not on the pitch at which the vowel is spoken or sung, thus confirming the fixed-pitch theory of Helmholtz.
Membership
In 1914 Miller was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 1919 to the American Philosophical Society, and in 1921 to the National Academy of Sciences. From 1918 until his death he held various offices in the American Physical Society, including the presidency for the 1925-1926 term. From 1927 to 1930 he was chairman of the National Research Council’s Division of Physical Sciences, and from 1913 to 1933 he was president of the Acoustical Society of America.
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
,
United States
1914 - 1941
American Philosophical Society
,
United States
1919 - 1941
National Academy of Sciences
,
United States
1921 - 1941
American Physical Society
,
United States
1918 - 1941
National Research Council
,
United States
1927 - 1930
Acoustical Society of America
,
United States
1931 - 1933
Personality
Miller was an effective teacher, a captivating public lecturer, and a respected research scientist. His work in acoustics grew out of a love for music that dated from childhood. His mother had been the church organist, his father had sung in the choir, and Miller himself was an accomplished flutist. Miller was himself a skilled musical performer, particularly on the flute. He was also an avid collector. Over the years he assembled nearly 1, 500 flutes, together with an extensive collection of books relating to the flute; both collections were left by his will to the Music Division of the Library of Congress.
Interests
music, collecting flutes
Connections
Miller married Edith C. Easton of Princeton, New Jersey, on June 28, 1893; they had no children.