Herbert Eugene Ives was born on July 21, 1882, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the son of Frederic Eugene Ives and Mary Olmstead. The course of Ives’s career was strongly influenced by his father who developed several processes connected with color photography and halftone printing. Much of the elder Ives’s experimentation was done at home and must inevitably have influenced his son.
Ives attended the University of Pennsylvania, receiving the Bachelor of Science degree in 1905. He obtained a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins in 1908, working under R.W. Wood and writing a dissertation on a study of standing light waves in the Lippmann photographic process.
In the period 1898-1901 Ives worked for his father in the Ives Kromskop Company, designing and constructing apparatus for color photography. He then was employed by the National Bureau of Standards (1908-1909), the National Electric Lamp Association in Cleveland, Ohio (1909-1912), and the United Gas Improvement Company in Philadelphia (1912-1917). He volunteered for the army, working on aerial photography for the Signal Corps (1918-1919). One result of his service was the book Airplane Photography, published in 1920. After the war Ives went to work for the Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he remained until his retirement in 1947.
Ives’s early involvement with photography led him into a long association with problems in colorimetry and photometry, and papers on these subjects dominate the period of his life prior to World War I. He was especially concerned with the design of photometric instruments. His papers are credited with having been largely responsible for introducing tristimulus colorimetry into the United States.
After moving to the Bell Laboratories, Ives became more interested in photoelectric effects and in television. He measured in great detail the photoelectric effect of alkali metal films as a function of polarization, angle of incidence, and alloy composition. Changes in these variables produced some striking anomalies, which Ives eventually concluded were due to standing wave patterns formed in the film. Another series of experiments led him to conclude that the photoelectric and thermionic work functions were identical.
Ives spent a considerable amount of time from 1924 to 1930 on the development of television. Using Nipkov disks with photoelectric cells at the transmitter and neon lamps at the receiver, he performed a series of successful demonstrations, beginning in 1927 with a transmission between Washington and New York.
In 1938 and again in 1941 Ives, together with G. R. Stilwell, described a series of experiments on the transverse Doppler effect. It had been suggested by Einstein in 1907 that this effect - which could confirm the Lorcntz transformations as applied in the special theory of relativity - might be discovered by observing hydrogen canal rays. A special tube developed by A. J. Dempster in 1932 produced spectral lines narrow enough so that the small displacement could be observed. Other specialized experimental techniques enabled Ives and Stilwell to find the effect, which was consistent with prediction.
Herbert Eugene Ives went down in history as a prominent scientist and engineer who is probably best known for conducting the Ives-Stilwell experiment, which provided direct confirmation of special relativity's time dilation.
Ives received numerous awards during his lifetime, including medals from the Franklin Institute and the Optical Society of America, and the Rumford Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. President Harry Truman awarded Ives the Medal for Merit in 1948 for his war-time work on blackout lighting and optical communication systems.
Ives was president of the Optical Society in 1924-1925 and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1933. He was also president of the American Numismatic Society in 1942-1946.
Ives' avocations included coin collecting. A portrait painter of some talent, he developed a three-colour palette.
In 1908 Ives married Mabel Lorenz, and they had three children.
