Albert Michelson

Origins and early life

Albert Abraham Michelson was born on 19 December 1852 in Strelno, in Prussia, now Strzelno in Poland, and was two when his family emigrated to the United States, where he grew up in the mining towns of Murphy's Camp and Virginia City. He was the son of a Jewish merchant, and his sister, the novelist Miriam Michelson, wrote that both their parents were born of Jewish parents, but the family was not religious and he remained an agnostic all his life.

Appointed to the Naval Academy at Annapolis by President Ulysses Grant in 1869, he graduated in 1873 and, after two years at sea, came back to teach physics and chemistry there.

Work and career

In 1879, from a frame building on the Academy's sea wall, he made his first precise measurements of the speed of light, then took leave to study in Berlin, Heidelberg and Paris. In Berlin he designed a new interferometer, and in 1887, at Cleveland, he and the chemist Edward Morley used it to look for the Earth's motion through the ether thought to carry light, and found none. That null result, the Michelson–Morley experiment, helped prepare the ground for Einstein's relativity, and the same instrument let him measure the standard metre in wavelengths of cadmium light.

Recognition

In 1892 he became the first head of physics at the new University of Chicago, and in 1907 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, unshared, for his optical precision instruments and the spectroscopic and metrological investigations carried out with their aid, the first American to win a Nobel Prize in the sciences. Back in the Navy during the First World War, he developed a rangefinder for its ships, and in 1920 he and Francis Pease measured the diameter of the star Betelgeuse, the first such measurement of a star other than the Sun.

He died in Pasadena on 9 May 1931, at seventy-eight, while his last measurement of the speed of light, in a vacuum tube a mile long, was still under way.