Background
Bruce was the son of a tailor. His family moved soon after his birth from Glasgow to Newport-on-Tay, where he went to grade school: at the age of 14, he went to the High School of Dundee.
Bruce was the son of a tailor. His family moved soon after his birth from Glasgow to Newport-on-Tay, where he went to grade school: at the age of 14, he went to the High School of Dundee.
He was then educated at the University of Edinburgh where he graduated Master of Arts and Bachelor of Science in 1924 with First Class Honours in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy.
Bruce was elected as a fellow of the Institute of Physics in 1946 and of the Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1947. In 1952, he submitted his papers on electrical discharges to Edinburgh University and was subsequently awarded a Doctorate of Science. Bruce retired from European Research Area in 1967.
He died in 1979, after a long illness.
Bruce"s first years at European Research Area were spent working on the analysis of oil-based circuit breakers. In 1939, still at European Research Area, he shifted his attention to lightning.
His contributions included a significant strengthening of the electrical gradients known to occur in lightning strikes, and a demonstration that grounding of transmission lines may be counterproductive. Beginning in 1941, when he attended a lecture on astrophysics at Edinburgh University, Bruce"s own interests headed in the same direction.
He immediately developed a theory that solar prominences consisted of electrical discharges in plasma, rather than of moving solar matter, and he eventually published over 100 papers concerning the electrical basis of various cosmological phenomena.
However, his work in this area has been largely ignored by mainstream science.