Mr. Tatnall kept a
diary of his visits,
which was published
in 1966 as a semi-autobiography. It was
titled Tatnall on Testing, and it is still available at Google Books.
Tatnall wrote:
Louis Bryant Tuckerman Jr.
give me a license to
make and sell his
instrument along
with the Whit-
temore strain gage,
since this optical
gage had its place
in areas requir-
ing extraordinary
precision, such as
calibrating work.
Dr. Tuckerman of-
fered me the rights
then and there… I
declined on the ba-
sis that I had better
work myself into
the strain gage busi-
ness by easy stages,
and I would not
know how to get an
exquisite thing like the Tuckerman
gage produced. We agreed that the
American Instrument Company of
Silver Spring, Md., be invited to
undertake the work. ;at com-
pany later did put it on the market,
but it was a long time before Dr.
Tuckerman reached the end of his
improvements and refinements, and
he never did admit his gage was
completely finished.”
OSA Optics & Photonics Congress
REGISTER
TODAY
“After the introduction to his mechanical strain gage, Mr.
Whittemore took
me into the adjoining o;ce, where a
be-whiskered and
benevolent-looking
gentleman was seated
at a roll-top desk. He
was the well-known
scientific personality and member
of the Cosmos Club, Dr. Louis B.
Tuckerman. He was completely
surrounded by disorderly piles and
stacks and walls of reports, papers,
publications, notes and I don’t
know what else; the most hopeless
collection of unfinished business I
have ever seen. Or maybe it wasn’t
unfinished; maybe it was his private
library, or an informal filing system
of the U.S. O;ce of Scientific Information. One thing I later noticed—
If he wanted some paper or report,
he could quickly pick it out of that
messy pile with his eyes shut. His
was surely the original automatic
information retrieval system, and
IBM could well study it.
Behind these mountains of
papers, Dr. Tuckerman was developing his own strain gage of super
precision. ;is one was optical and
he said it could be read directly to
0.000002-inch per inch strain. ;is
proved to be no idle boast, and
today (1966) this is the basic standard instrument used for calibrators
by strain gage manufacturers. ;e
Tuckerman gage was not easy to
handle…but I hold it in deepest
respect. I have never seen its peer.
Mr. Whittemore volunteered
the suggestion that Dr. Tuckerman
C.A. Skinner served as
OSA’s vice president in
1920, and Tuckerman
served as Secretary from
1930 through 1939.
Louis Bryant Tuckerman retired from
NBS in 1949 and died in Briarcli; Manor, N.Y., in 1962. In 1939, Tuckerman’s
son Louis Bryant Tuckerman III—at
the time a graduate student in mathematics—was one of a group at Princeton
University who discovered and exploited
the hexaflexagon as a mathematical curiosity. ;e other members of the team
included fellow math grad student A.H.
Stone, J.W. Tukey, who was a young
math instructor, and Richard Feynman,
a graduate student in physics. Feynman developed mathematical diagrams
to explain the hexaflexagon, and those
diagrams were the forerunners of the
Feynman diagrams for which Feynman
later won a Nobel Prize in physics.
biomedical optics and 3-d imaging
COLLOCATED TOPICAL MEETINGS
AND TABLETOP EXHIBIT
Biomedical Optics
(BIOMED)
Digital Holography and
Three-Dimensional
Imaging (DH)
April 11-14, 2010
The Deauville Beach
resort Hotel
miami, florida, usa
housing deadline:
MarcH 5, 2010
pre-registration deadline:
MarcH 5, 2010
postdeadline submission
deadline:
MarcH 16, 2010
12:00 pM nOOn EDT ( 16.00 gMT)
John N. Howard (johnnelsonhoward@gmail.
com) is the founding editor of Applied Optics and
retired chief scientist of the Air Force Geophysical Laboratory.
FOr THE la TEs T InFOrMa TIOn
On all MEE TIngs v IsI T
www.osa.org/congresses
