Lee Alvin DuBridge (September 21, 1901 – January 23, 1994) was an American physicist and academic administrator. He led the MIT Radiation Laboratory, served as president of Caltech, and advised three U.S. presidents on science policy. DuBridge's early research on the photoelectric effect produced the standard text on the subject, and at the University of Rochester he built one of the most powerful cyclotrons in the United States. In 1940, Ernest Lawrence and Alfred Loomis recruited him to direct the newly established MIT Radiation Laboratory, which under his leadership grew from a few dozen physicists to a staff of approximately 4,000 and developed over 100 types of microwave radar for the Allied war effort. DuBridge's management of the Rad Lab established a model for subsequent "big science" partnerships between civilian science and the military. After the war DuBridge served as president of the California Institute of Technology for twenty-three years, overseeing a period of rapid growth in which the campus, endowment, and faculty roughly tripled in size. He held senior science advisory positions under presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Nixon, and was a prominent defender of academic freedom during the McCarthy era. Time featured him on its cover in 1955, calling him "the senior statesman of science." Harold Brown and John D. Roberts, in their memoir for the American Philosophical Society, described him as "one of the most influential American scientists of the 20th century."
Background DuBridge was born on September 21, 1901, in Terre Haute, Indiana. His father held a series of jobs as a YMCA secretary, football coach, and physical education director, and the family moved frequently across Iowa, California, Montana, and Michigan. His mother was a poet and writer who during the Depression wrote verse for greeting cards. DuBridge enrolled at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, in 1918, supporting himself with a scholarship and the thirty dollars a month he earned as a waiter in a women's dormitory. He had intended to study economics, but when a favored professor left and was replaced by one he disliked, he turned to physics instead. There he was drawn deeper into the subject by his professor O. H. Smith, later a recipient of the Oersted Medal for physics teaching. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1922. DuBridge then entered the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where his first assignment was Arnold Sommerfeld's Atombau und Spektrallinien, read in the original German under Charles Mendenhall. He received his M.A. in 1924 and his Ph.D. in 1926 with a dissertation on the photoelectric effect in platinum. During his graduate years he also worked a summer at Bell Telephone Laboratories with the future Nobel laureate Clinton Davisson.
Research career
Photoelectric research After completing his doctorate DuBridge held a National Research Council fellowship at Caltech from 1926 to 1928, working under Robert Millikan on the relationship between thermionic and photoelectric emission. He then joined Washington University in St. Louis as an assistant professor, where he collaborated with Arthur Hughes on Photoelectric Phenomena (McGraw-Hill, 1932), which became a standard reference in the field for many years. A second volume, New Theories of the Photoelectric Effect, followed in 1935. DuBridge spent fifteen years studying photoelectric processes, building all the apparatus required for experiments of increasing precision. In 1931 he also described in Physical Review an amplifier for very small currents with applications to measurements of radioactivity; this apparatus, known as the Brown-DuBridge amplifier, was later placed on exhibit in the National Museum of History and Technology.
University of Rochester In 1934, at age thirty-three, DuBridge was appointed full professor and chairman of the physics department at the University of Rochester, which had recently been endowed by George Eastman. He brought in Fred Seitz and Milton Plesset and helped rescue Victor Weisskopf from Hitler's Europe, making Weisskopf among the department's first Jewish faculty. DuBridge shifted the department's focus toward nuclear physics, leading construction of the third, and at the time most powerful, cyclotron in the United States. The team built an 18-inch machine with advice from Ernest Lawrence and Cooksey at Berkeley, borrowing metal for magnets, obtaining electrical equipment without charge, and raising $4,000 from local donors for cash expenses. By 1936 it reached 5 MeV and eventually nearly 8 MeV. In 1938, DuBridge was additionally appointed dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Radiation Laboratory (MIT)
In the fall of 1940, as the National Defense Research Committee organized the American response to the European war, Ernest Lawrence and financier Alfred Loomis sought a director for a new microwave radar laboratory to be established at MIT. Lawrence, who had declined the position himself, identified DuBridge on the basis of his demonstrated scientific and administrative abilities. On October 15, Lawrence telephoned DuBridge from Loomis's apartment in New York. "I can't tell you about it, but I assure you it's very important," he said. DuBridge took the train that evening and the next day, at a meeting at the Hotel Commodore with Lawrence and Loomis, accepted the post of technical director, a title soon changed to director. DuBridge and Lawrence immediately began recruiting physicists. They visited Louis A. Turner at Princeton, and DuBridge attended a seminar at Indiana University to sound out researchers including Isidor Rabi and F. Wheeler Loomis. A conference on applied nuclear physics at MIT in late October 1940, attended by some 600 physicists, provided a broader recruiting opportunity. At luncheon meetings at the Algonquin Club in Boston, hosted by Loomis and Karl Compton, select invitees signed secrecy agreements and received a briefing on the new laboratory's mission. By mid-December 1940 the Laboratory consisted of about 30 physicists, three guards, two stockroom men, and one secretary.
Leadership and organization
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