The Inauguration of Ernest Fox Nichols, D. Sc;, LL. D. as President of Dartmouth College: October 14, 1909 (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from The Inauguration of Ernest Fox Nichols, D. S...)
Excerpt from The Inauguration of Ernest Fox Nichols, D. Sc;, LL. D. As President of Dartmouth College: October 14, 1909
On April 6, 1907, President Tucker forwarded to the trustees of Dartmouth College his letter of resignation and asked that it be accepted at the earliest possible time. However, at the insistent solicitation of the trustees, he consented in a later note, written May 11, to Withhold this letter and to retain the presidency under the necessary limitations of his illness, until such time as the board could study the educational field and make intelligent choice of his successor.
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Physics Ernest Fox Nichols the Columbia University Press (Classic Reprint)
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In the upbtiilding of all the great and diverse departments of thought, characteristic methods have arisen which the hmnan reason has fomid best suited to the pursuit of the many phases of truth which it seeks. In the perfection of methods and resourcefulness in applying them, no age has been more fertile than our own. Yet one ever present danger to the orderly and symmetrical development of modem thought, is that those working in different fields for its advancement may lose touch with one another, and the interchange of methods and results so essential to balanced growth, be neglected. If in such a course of lectures as this, each lecturer coming from a neighboring or distant field succeeds in showing the nature of the evidence ht has been taught to consider, his methods of weighing it and some of his results, the university will be the gainer in increased knowledge, in broadened sympathies and in a deeper realization of the wholeness of truth. It is doubtful if our understanding of the unity of external nature can ever be illuminated by the lamp of any one of the natural sciences. The division of nature into separate departments of study has been an intellectual necessity caused by the greatness of the task. The easiest cleavage would separate the animate from the inanimate, the biological from the physical sciences.
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Ernest Fox Nichols was an American physicist, teacher. He served as president of Dartmouth College.
Background
Ernest Fox Nichols was born on June 1, 1869 in Leavenworth, Kansas, United States in the Reconstruction period following the Civil War. His father, Alonzo Curtis Nichols, a photographer especially interested in daguerreotypes, and his mother, Sophronia (Fox) Nichols, succumbed to the struggle against poverty and ill health while Nichols was yet a boy, and left him to the care of his maternal uncle, General S. M. Fox, of Manhattan, Kansas. His ancestry on both sides was American for many generations back, the family coming from English-Scotch stock which had settled in New England during the early part of the seventeenth century.
Education
A frail child, Nichols obtained his elementary education at home. His first institutional schooling was received at the Kansas State Agricultural College at Manhattan, from which he obtained the degree of Bachelor of Science in 1888. While there he attended an illustrated talk on experimental physics given in the college chapel by Professor Edward L. Nichols of Cornell University. This lecture so stimulated his interest in physics that he decided to devote himself to the study of that subject, and after a year of graduate study in Kansas he went to Cornell to undertake advanced work. The next four years he spent at Ithaca in study and in acquiring experimental technique in his chosen field of radiation. He received the degree of Master of Science from Cornell University the following spring. On his return from Germany Nichols completed the requirements for the Doctor of Science which was conferred upon him by Cornell in 1897.
Nichols was given honorary degrees by Dartmouth, Colgate, Clark, Wesleyan, Vermont, Pittsburgh, and Denison.
Career
His first published paper appeared on page 1, Volume I (July-August 1893) of the Physical Review. Although this contribution came from Colgate, the work which it described was done at Cornell during the summer of 1892. It consisted of an experimental study of the transmission spectra of a number of substances in the infra-red region extending as far as the wave length 3Ï. For this investigation Nichols devised a weak-field galvanometer of such high sensitivity that he was able to measure currents of 10-10 amp. The difficulty of working with an instrument so susceptible to external disturbances led him to consider other methods of studying radiation and resulted in the later development of the Nichols radiometer, an instrument which he used in all his more important researches.
In 1894 Nichols obtained leave of absence from Colgate to go to Emil Warburg's laboratory in Berlin. The first task undertaken there was the adaptation of Sir William Crookes's radiometer to the measurement of energy in the infra-red spectrum. Aided by suggestions from Ernst Pringsheim, who had already studied this instrument, Nichols constructed a radiometer with blackened mica vanes hung by a quartz fiber the suspended parts of which weighed only 7 mg. This instrument was so sensitive that a candle 6 meters away produced a deflection of 60 scale divisions. With it he investigated the reflecting powers of silver and of quartz up to 9Ï, finding that silver became an almost perfect reflector for wave lengths between 4Ï and 9Ï and that quartz possessed such strong absorption bands between 8Ï and 9Ï that it exhibited the properties of metallic reflection.
In this investigation Nichols took his first step in bridging the unexplored region between the visible spectrum and the electro-magnetic waves of Heinrich Hertz, a task which he made one of the principal objectives of his life, and which he successfully completed only on the day of his death. The work under consideration extended the known spectrum from 3Ï, to which point it had been brought by Heinrich Rubens, up to 9Ï.
Nichols' investigation of the absorption bands of quartz led him to develop with Rubens a new method of isolating a limited portion of the long-wave spectrum without the difficulties attendant upon the use of prisms or gratings. This method of "residual rays" consists in the successive reflection of radiation from surfaces of a substance like quartz which has a narrow absorption band at the wave length to be studied surrounded by regions of transparency. Radiation of the critical wave length is almost completely reflected, while that on either side passes through the surface. Using fluorite the investigators were able to study residual rays of a wave length of 30Ï. To measure the wave length accurately, recourse was had to a diffraction grating of fine gold wires and a bolometer, use of the radiometer being precluded by the fact that no substance transparent to these long waves could be found of which to construct the window. In later papers, Rubens and Nichols studied the residual rays from rock salt and mica as well as those from quartz and fluorite. In these investigations a radiometer with a silver chloride window was used in place of a bolometer, as it had been found that silver chloride was sufficiently transparent to the long waves involved to make the radiometer a much more sensitive detector than the bolometer. The longest radiation investigated was that obtained by reflection from rock salt, which was estimated to be not far from 50Ï. Thus the known spectrum of heat rays was extended from the red end of the visible region to a wave length of a twentieth of a millimeter, approximately the thickness of a sheet of paper. In addition to this extension of the spectrum, the September 1897 paper contained an experimental confirmation of the electromagnetic character of infra-red radiation. As a verification of James Clark Maxwell's electromagnetic theory of light, this work was second in importance only to the famous experiments of Hertz. The method consisted in measuring the radiation reflected from a glass plate covered by minute rectangular silver resonators. In accord with theory and with the results which Augusto Righi had obtained for short electrical waves, the reflection was found to be much greater when the lengths of the resonators approximated a whole number of half-wave lengths than when near an odd number of quarter-wave lengths.
In 1898 he left Colgate to accept a professorship of physics at Dartmouth. Here he spent five of the most productive years of his life applying his radiometer to the investigation of important physical problems.
His first research, carried out at the Yerkes Observatory during the summers of 1898 and 1900, consisted in the measurement of the relative heat received by the earth from the stars Vega and Arcturus and the planets Jupiter and Saturn. Several years before, Charles Vernon Boys had made a similar attempt with his radiomicrometer, but without success. The sensitivity of the radiometer used by Nichols in this work was sufficient to detect one fifty-millionth of the heat coming from a candle one meter distant, a sensitivity twenty-six times as great as that of Boys's instrument.
Nichols' next investigation, undertaken at Dartmouth with the collaboration of Gordon F. Hull, was the crowning achievement of his life. Maxwell had shown as early as 1873 that light, if electromagnetic in nature, should exert a pressure on an obstacle placed in its path, which is twice as great for a perfect reflector as for an ideal absorber. The minuteness of the predicted effect, however, had discouraged experimenters from attempting to detect it.
Nichols, nevertheless, had planned as early as his Berlin days to make an effort to measure light pressure with the sensitive radiometer which he had designed. For this purpose the blackened vanes of the instrument were replaced by silvered vanes of high reflecting power and a series of preliminary experiments were made to find the pressure (16 mm. of Hg) at which the effect of the bombardment of gas molecules was a minimum. For gas action, although an advantage in the measurement of heat energy, would only mask the effect of light pressure in the present work. Since gas action increases with the time of exposure, this effect was further reduced by allowing the light to fall on the radiometer vane for a very short time, and measuring the pressure by the ballistic throw. The intensity of the incident light was determined at first by a bolometer, but later more accurately by means of the rise in temperature occasioned by its absorption. Not only was light pressure detected, but the theoretical formula connecting the pressure with the energy per unit volume was verified within a probable error of less than one per cent. Unknown to Nichols and Hull, Peter Lebedew in Moscow was working on the same problem at the same time, and through a strange coincidence the first complete reports of the two independent investigations appeared simultaneously in November 1901 in the Physical Review and in Drude's Annalen der Physic. Lebedew's results were in complete accord with those of Nichols and Hull, although his method differed in a number of important details.
In 1903 Nichols left Dartmouth to become professor of physics at Columbia University. Here he remained until 1909, with the exception of the winter of 1904-05, spent on leave of absence at Cambridge University, England. During this period he carried out further work on residual rays (Physical Review, October 1908), consisting particularly of exact measurements of wave length. Incidentally he showed the complete absence in sunlight, even at the altitude of Mt. Wilson Observatory, of long-wave radiation of the order of 50Ï.
It was natural that the board of regents of Dartmouth College should turn to him in 1909 to fill the vacancy in the presidency caused by the retirement of W. J. Tucker. Although he realized that acceptance would halt his scientific activities, he served in this position for seven years.
At the end of that time he had established the college on a secure financial and scholastic basis and felt free to resign in order to accept a professorship of physics at Yale. But before he could resume research the United States entered the World War, and he spent the next two years in investigating schemes proposed by others to combat the submarine menace and in making contributions of his own.
In 1920 he left Yale to become director of the Nela Research Laboratory in Cleveland, and a few months later he succeeded Richard Cockburn MacLaurin as president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Unfortunately he was stricken by a serious illness which made it necessary for him to resign from this position even before he had stepped into active service. The remaining years of his life were spent at the Nela Laboratory in completing the exploration of the region between the longest known heat rays and the shortest known electrical waves which he had begun twenty-five years earlier. In the intervening time the gap had been shortened to the region from 0. 4 mm. to 7. 0 mm. This time he approached the unexplored territory from the long-wave length side, developing, in collaboration with James DeGraff Tear, a Hertzian oscillator consisting of a spark gap in kerosene between tungsten cylinders only 0. 01 mm. apart. The receiver was a radiometer whose vanes carried minute platinum resonators which absorbed the waves to which they were tuned. With this apparatus fundamental wave lengths were obtained as short as 0. 9 mm. and harmonics down to 0. 22 mm. The work was completed in time for Nichols to report the complete closing of the gap between heat rays and electrical waves at the spring meeting of the National Academy of Sciences in 1924. In the middle of his paper, the speaker's heart stopped, and before medical aid could arrive he had passed away.
Achievements
Nichols developed a new method of isolating a limited portion of the long-wave spectrum without the difficulties attendant upon the use of prisms or gratings.
He was chairman of the physics and engineering section of the National Academy of Sciences from 1917 to 1920.
He received the Rumford medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1907.
(Presented To The Academy At The Annual Meeting, 1925.)
Membership
Nichols was a member of the American Philosophical and many other societies, and a fellow of the American Physical Society.
Personality
In addition to being a brilliant investigator, Nichols combined the power of the artist with that of the scientist in devising demonstration experiments to illustrate his lectures and had the rare gift of inspiring his students with a love of productive scholarship. Moreover he exhibited the wise judgment, the eloquence of speech, and the sympathetic appreciation of the viewpoints of others characteristic of a successful administrator.
Connections
At Hamilton Nichols made the acquaintance of Katharine Williams West, whom he married on June 16, 1894. She and a daughter survived him.
