Background
DeWitt Bristol Brace was born on January 5, 1859, at Wilson, New York, and was the son of Lusk and Emily (Bristol) Brace.
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
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DeWitt Bristol Brace was born on January 5, 1859, at Wilson, New York, and was the son of Lusk and Emily (Bristol) Brace.
Brace received his preparatory education at Lockport, and graduated from Boston University in 1881. Then followed two years' graduate study at Johns Hopkins University, and two years more at the University of Berlin (Ph. D. 1885) to which he was attracted by the fame of Helmholtz and Kirchhoff.
After a year as acting assistant professor of physics at the University of Michigan, he became instructor in the department of chemistry and physics at the University of Nebraska.
In 1888, Brace became head of the newly established department of physics, a position held until his death. His first decade at Nebraska was concerned with the cares incident to building up a department of physics and starting what later became the department of electrical engineering. Having very meager funds at his disposal, he converted a university carpenter into an instrument maker who constructed most of the institution's first real laboratory equipment.
Later, he developed an electrician's helper into a most efficient lecture demonstrator and manipulator with whose help he eventually worked up an unexcelled series of lecture experiments. Little evidence exists, outside the memory of his students, of any research activity in that period.
The university authorities, frowning for policy's sake upon such a misuse of public funds, cleared away, under trivial excuse, the key part of a setup he had made, with borrowed apparatus, for remeasuring the velocity of light.
He was by no means inactive, however, for during this time an interesting electric generator and also a rectifier were designed, constructed, and patented.
Ill luck attended him here, too, for both became obsolete before they could be promoted. With scientific instruments he was more successful; among several, the Brace spectrophotometer and the Brace Half Shade Elliptic Polarizer and Compensator are of recognized merit.
The second decade was one of constantly accelerated scientific production. It was initiated in 1896 by a change occurring in his staff which led to the appointment of two young instructors actively interested in research and two teaching graduate students who formed the nucleus of a graduate organization.
This called for research problems, research equipment, and graduate courses in theoretical physics. To create an atmosphere of research, he deemed it necessary that all should be busy with it.
By shouldering the lion's share of both undergraduate and graduate instruction, he allowed his associates a generous part of their time for the purpose and at the same time impressed them with the importance of this phase of their duties.
Brace's own chosen field was optics, and here he was primarily concerned with the fundamental principles affecting the velocity of propagation of light. Although fifteen contributions under his own name and about an equal number by his students complete the list of publications for which he was primarily responsible, these dealt largely with the fundamental problems of the day and were as crucial as the method of attack could possibly be made. The more important of them are to be found in the London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine, October 1897, November 1899, April 1901, February 1903, April 1904, July 1905, September 1905, November 1905; and in the Physical Review, January 1904, November 1905. Brace also translated and edited The Laws of Radiation and Absorption (1901), consisting of memoirs by Prévost, Kirchhoff, and others.
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
In his doctor's thesis, Brace had described not entirely conclusive attempts to prove that a clockwise circular vibration travels along a magnetic field in a material medium with a velocity different from that of a counterclockwise vibration.
Sixteen years later, he proved by a very ingenious device that the refractive index of such a medium differed for the two vibrations to an extent that permitted observable separation of a plane polarized incident beam into two beams circularly polarized in opposite directions.
Likewise, either he or his students were engaged for some years in studying the effects of an electric field, static and kinetic mechanical stresses, and "'ther drift" on the velocity of propagation of light through matter. These investigations were uniformly distinguished by the sensitiveness of the methods used for detecting or measuring the effects.
In 1901, Dewitt Bristo Brace married Elizabeth Russell Wing, a former graduate of the University of Nebraska.
