Optics & Photonics News - December 2009

OSA | HISTORY

After obtaining his degree, Ives worked at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) for a year, then spent three years at the GE Nela Park Laboratory and six at the United Gas Improvement Co. of Philadelphia. His papers were on photometry, colorimetry and vision. In late 1917, R.A. Millikan asked him to come to Washington to meet with him. Millikan asked him to join the army to perform war research as a captain in the Signal Corps. He worked until 1919 on developing cameras that could withstand the vibrations of airplanes. After the war he joined the engineering department of the Western Electric Co. (later renamed Bell Telephone Laboratory), and by the 1930s he had become director of research. He remained at Bell Labs until obligatory retirement at age 65.

Ives was a charter member of OSA. Of his more than 120 papers scattered over many fields, 67 appeared in JOSA,

In 1912, 26-year-old

Irwin G. Priest used a

Stratton interferometer

to measure the wave-

lengths of radiation

from a discharge tube

of neon.

chiefly relating to television or relativity. He also wrote on the optical constants of the salts of sodium and potassium. He endowed the OSA Frederic Ives medal, named for his father, and he was himself a recipient of the medal in 1937. He died Nov. 15, 1953.

William Elmer Forsythe
1926-1927

William Elmer Forsythe was born in Ohio in 1881 and graduated from Denison University. He then completed his doctorate on blackbody radiation under Charles Mendenhall at the University of Wisconsin before joining the Nela Park Research Laboratory of the General Electric Company in Cleveland in 1913. By 1924, he was director of research, and he remained at Nela Park until he retired in 1946. His specialty was in temperature radiation measurements.

He did much of the determination of the physical characteristics of tungsten wire as used in incandescent bulbs. He wrote a book called Measurement of Radiant Energy, and another on Fluorescent and Other Gaseous Discharge Lamps. He is probably best known as the compiler and editor of the Smithsonian Physical