OSA | HISTORY
The
First Two
Editors of JOSA
John N. Howard
OSA’s first journal—The Journal of the Optical
Society of America—was launched in 1917, just
one year after the Society came into existence.
Here, John Howard chronicles the lives of
JOSA’s first two editors.
Stu Griffith
Hermann Kellner
Hermann Kellner was born in Germany
on July 20, 1873. While working in
the optical industries, he studied at the
University of Berlin and then obtained a
Ph.D. from the University of Jena in 1899.
In 1900, Kellner came to the United
States to work at the Spencer Lens Company in Buffalo as an optical designer
and controller of optical quality. In 1905,
he had a physical breakdown (caused,
he said, by the winters in Buffalo) and
returned to Berlin.
However, a year or two later, he returned to the United States, this time as
director of the Scientific Bureau of Bausch
& Lomb in Rochester. He remained there
until his death on January 18, 1926. He
was a charter member of OSA.
The microscope was always Kellner’s
favorite optical instrument. Outside of
optics, Kellner was fond of music and
art. However, his main hobby was watch-making. He had an extensive collection
of watches and chronometers dating back
to the early history of the art.
As an editor, Kellner was exceedingly precise and exacting. Some of his
contemporaries claimed that Kellner did
not receive enough papers to fill the first
issues. However, other old-timers, who
were probably more discerning, declared
that there was no shortage of submissions; rather, papers were either bottlenecked on Kellner’s desk or summarily
rejected as below standard. Nevertheless,
under Kellner’s leadership, the journal
made a slow but sure beginning. He was
editor from 1917 to 1919.
Paul Foote
Paul Darwin Foote was born March 27,
1888, in Andover, Ohio. From 1905
to 1909, he attended Western Reserve
University, where he studied physics and
mathematics. To pay his way through college, he worked part-time for a law firm.
Although he briefly considered studying law, Foote ultimately chose physics
for his career. He then got a lab assistant
position in physics at the University of
Nebraska, where he studied under C.A.
Skinner and received an M.Sc. in 1911.
Skinner believed that students should
learn by experience.
Once, when Foote laboriously assembled an apparatus by soldering brass
segments, Foote asked Skinner if he
should clean the device by dipping it in
boiling oil. Skinner replied (with a faint
smile), “Well, you could try.” Foote then
discovered the hard way that the boiling
point of oil is higher than the melting
point of solder.
Foote took a course from L.B. Tuckerman at Nebraska on quaternions, a noncommutative number system that extends
the complex numbers. (C.A. Skinner was
vice president of OSA in 1920, and L.B.
Tuckerman was OSA secretary from 1930
to 1939.) Foote published a summary of
his thesis in the Physical Review in 1912.
(It was titled, “On the magnetic rotation of the plane of polarization of plane
polarized light reflected from mirrors in a
magnetic field.”)
In 1911, Foote took a civil service
exam for a position at the National
Bureau of Standards. He used his
mathematical skill with quaternions to
solve some of the problems on the test.
Although he was disappointed to receive
only a “pass” on the exam, that grade
was sufficient to secure him an appointment. Some years later, he met the man
who had graded his exam; the grader
confessed that he did not understand
quaternions at all, but that, since Foote’s
answers had been correct, he had marked
his test as “pass.” (Quaternions were a
brainchild of William Rowan Hamilton;
they never became popular in mainstream physics.)
