Background
Ira Sprague Bowen was born on December 21, 1898, in Seneca Falls, New York. His father, James Henry Bowen, was a Methodist minister and later business agent for the Methodist church.
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Ira Sprague Bowen was born on December 21, 1898, in Seneca Falls, New York. His father, James Henry Bowen, was a Methodist minister and later business agent for the Methodist church.
The family, including an older brother and Ira, moved often in New York State, so Ira received his first schooling from his mother, Philinda May Sprague, a licensed teacher. After her husband's death in 1908, Mrs. Bowen taught at Houghton Wesleyan Methodist Seminary, where Ira completed high school.
He continued in the college course at the seminary for three years, where he was keenly interested in the courses in mathematics, physics, and astronomy. Then he entered Oberlin College for his senior year and received the B. A. in 1919. Bowen took graduate studies at the University of Chicago. There, while teaching and publishing research papers, Bowen was persuaded by his colleagues to complete the requirements for the Ph. D. , which he received in 1926.
At the University of Chicago, Bowen became assistant to Nobel laureate Robert A. Millikan, and transferred with him when Millikan moved to the California Institute of Technology in 1921. And after receiving his Ph. D. from the University of Chicago, he then became assistant professor at Caltech and advanced to professor in 1931.
In the first year at Caltech, Bowen and Millikan obtained the highest records of cosmic rays to that time by using unmanned sounding balloons launched from San Antonio, Texas. Bowen also measured cosmic-ray intensity in mountain lakes in California. From these field experiences, he began a lifelong avocation of hiking western mountains and deserts.
In 1938, Bowen was invited to visit the University of California's Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton, where he worked with Arthur B. Wyse. Using newly available photographic emulsions, they were able to determine that the relative abundance of elements in gaseous nebulae is about the same as that of the sun and stars, with hydrogen as the most abundant element.
During World War II, Bowen organized and guided the photographic section for a major Caltech program on solid-fuel rockets supported by the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Separately, he collaborated in studies of the transparency of seawater.
In 1946, Bowen was appointed director of the Mount Wilson Observatory by the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D. C. He closely directed the completion of the Hale 200-inch telescope that had been under construction at Caltech from 1930, but was delayed by World War II.
He assumed the task of testing the mirror on stars and of guiding the final steps of its polishing. The largest reflecting telescope in the world at that time was installed on Palomar Mountain in southern California in 1948. The Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories (later named Hale Observatories), jointly owned by Caltech and the Carnegie Institution, were under Bowen's direction from that year until 1964.
He formalized the agreement between the two organizations and was an effective administrator of this unique joint endeavor. Caltech enlarged its teaching program in astronomy, and several professors there held joint appointments. As soon as a forty-eight-inch Schmidt telescope was also installed at Palomar Observatory in 1948, it was used first, at Bowen's insistence, to create a detailed survey of the entire sky within its range.
The Palomar Sky Survey from 1948 to 1957 created a series of nine hundred photographic plates of the sky from the North Pole to declination - 30 degrees, and copies of it were distributed to observatories worldwide. Bowen always encouraged use of the facilities under his direction by astronomerselsewhere, especially those not located at major observatories.
He retired as director of the two observatories in 1964, but continued his own researches.
Bowen's dissertation presented a formula for the ratio of heat lost by evaporation and by conduction to the air from any water surface, which came to be known as the Bowen ratio. Using advanced equipment available at Mount Wilson Observatory, Bowen analyzed the more complex spectra of the first twenty elements of the periodic table. He went on to solve the problem of anomalous green lines, called "nebulium lines" in the spectra of galactic nebulae. These lines had been considered a hypothetical element found only in outer space. Bowen's careful analysis proved that the lines were due to supposedly "forbidden" transitions between energy levels of ionized atoms of ordinary elements, such as oxygen, that could prevail only under the unusually low density in gaseous nebulae.
Bowen was a member of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Bowen married Mary Jane Howard in 1929; they had no children. She pursued a career as child psychologist, and was a warm hostess to her husband's colleagues.