Presidents of the Late 1950s
John N. Howard
John recalls the lives of four key Society leaders in the late 1950s.
Dean Brewster Judd
1953-1954
Dean Brewster Judd was born in South
Hadley Falls, Mass., U.S.A., on 15
November 1900. He attended public
schools in Columbus, Ohio, and then
Ohio State University, where he received
an A.B. in 1922 and an M.A. in 1923.
He then completed his Ph.D. in physics
at Cornell University. In the summers of
1925 and 1926, he worked as a Munsell
research associate at the National Bureau
of Standards. In 1927, he became a
full-time NBS staff member. By 1947, he
was a physicist in colorimetry. He spent
his entire career at the National Bureau
of Standards (NBS) until he retired in
1969. (Even after that, he stayed on as a
guest worker for two more years.)
From the beginning of his work in
colorimetry, one of Judd’s primary interests was in the practical application of
spectrophotometry to problems of color
vision. In his doctoral dissertation on a
quantitative investigation of the Purkinje
afterimage, he demonstrated his pioneer
efforts in the use of psychology in colorimetric studies.
Before 1931, there were no interna-
tional standards for colorimetry. During
Judd’s first years at NBS, his research
was directed mainly at providing infor-
mation that Priest (then head of colo-
rimetry at NBS) would use at the 1931
meeting of the International Commis-
sion on Illumination (CIE). Priest took
ill in 1931 and died in 1932, and the
responsibility for the CIE colorimetry
work was left principally to Judd.
Ralph Alanson Sawyer
1955-1957
Ralph Sawyer was the last OSA president
to serve a two-year term. He was born
in Atkinson, N.H., U.S.A., and received
an A.B. from Dartmouth in 1915. He
did his graduate work at the University
of Chicago, where he received a Ph.D.
in 1919. He joined the physics faculty
of the University of Michigan that same
year and became a full professor in 1930.
In 1946, he became dean of the Horace
Rackham School of Graduate Studies. In
1959, he was vice president for research
18 | OPN Optics & Photonics News
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