Clan William: The Brilliant Scientist William Webster Hansen

Today's subject is the brilliant scientist, William Webster Hansen. A member of Clan William he descends in this way:

The Forthcamp Ave Neighborhood

Capt Thomas Munson > Samuel Munson > Samuel James Munson > William Munson > Martha Munson > Reuben Doolittle > Ormer Doolittle > Caroline Doolittle > Lydia Webster > Laura Gillogly > William Webster Hansen m Elisabeth "Betsy" Ross

William Webster Hansen was born to William George Hansen, son of a Danish immigrant, and hardware sales manager and his wife, Laura Gillogly, daughter of Rev James Lee Gillogly and wife Lydia Lucelia Webster on 27 May 1909 in Fresno, California. William had one sibling; a brother, James L Hansen (1917-1993).

Fresno High completed in 1889

William grew up at 735 Forthcamp Ave in the Lower Fulton-Van Ness neighborhood of Fresno. In the early 1900s, the neighborhood was full beautiful homes and cottages which were nearby the new trolley line. William excelled in school and graduated from Fresno High School at the age of 15. Following  high school, he attened Fresno Technical School for a year before winning the Dickey scholarship and moving on to attend Stanford University. He was elected to both Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma XI, the two highest national honor fraterntieis. Nearing graduation, he was then picked up as an instructor in the theory of electro magnetism and electrical measurements for the coming year. He received his PhD from Stanford in 1932 in Physics.After three years as an instructor at Stanford, he was awarded a National Research Council fellowship to MIT to continue his research.  He received a second fellowship in 1934 and his work at MIT also extended to work at Princeton University.

He returned to Stanford after his fellowship as an associate professor. And in 1938, he was finally able to focus on his personal life. He married a longtime friend, Miss Elisabeth "Betsy" Ross, of Palo Alto. She was the daughter of the late Dr. Perley Ason Ross, professor of physics at Stanford. Miss Ross had completed her junior year at Stanford when the unplanned marriage took place at Las Vegas, Nevada.

In 1942, he was appointed to a full professorship at Stanford.  World War II was raging and the physics team was working full-throttle for the war effort. 

Describing the work he did theyears from 1943-1949, the following is currently posted on the Stanford website and shows that his work was of critical importance:

The Middle 1930's through the 1960's

Encouraged initially by Enrico Fermi to do experimental physics because, among other things, it was "fun," in 1938 Bloch (in collaboration with Luis Alvarez) made the first experimental measurement of the magnetic moment of the neutron, marking the beginning of the work for which he is perhaps best known.

By the end of the Second World War, Bloch, working with Bill Hansen and Martin Packard, had succeeded in observing nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) in condensed matter by the method of nuclear induction. For these discoveries, and the discoveries made with this technique, Bloch shared the 1952 Nobel Prize in Physics with Harvard's Edward Purcell.

It was Stanford's first Nobel Prize. NMR has since become the most important spectroscopic technique in chemistry and biology, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), an imaging technique based upon it, is considered the greatest advance in medical imaging since the discovery of X-rays in 1895.

In the late 1930s, Research Associates Russell and Sigurd Varian, working in collaboration with their mentor, Professor Bill Hansen, invented the klystron, a high-power microwave source and amplifier. The klystron was rapidly developed during World War II for use in radar, navigation, and blind-landing devices for aircraft.

But Hansen, whose own contribution to the klystron was the resonant cavity called a rhumbatron, was interested in using the klystron for the acceleration of particles. And by 1947 he had built the first linear electron accelerator, the Mark I, which accelerated electrons to 6 MeV.

Then, just four years later, Edward Ginzton and Marvin Chodorow completed the Mark III, a 1-GeV electron accelerator. It was the Mark III that allowed Robert Hofstadter to study the charge and magnetic structure of nuclei and nucleons, work that earned him the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
Hansen's work has continued to be highly fruitful. In 1967, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), a national facility designed to hold a new two-mile accelerator, was completed and running, and nine years later, Stanford's Burton Richter shared the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the Psi/J-particle. In 1988, Mel Schwartz, a long-time member of the department, shared the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the muon neutrino, though this work had been done earlier at Brookhaven. Then, in 1990, Dick Taylor shared the Nobel Prize for his studies of deep inelastic scattering, which showed the existence of point-like objects in nucleons, now recognized as quarks. In 1995, Martin Perl won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of a new elementary particle known as the tau lepton.  https://physics.stanford.edu/our-history

On 10 Aug 1947, the Hansen's welcomed their only child, Peter Ross Hansen. Fate would not be kind as the infant died on 28 Sep 1947. 

Just two years later, on 23 May 1949, Dr. Bill Hansen died at the age of 39.  He died of a lung condition and pneumonia. Colleagues attributed his illness to overwork. 

Click to enlarge

The sadness doesn't end quite yet with this story. His wife, Betsy, moved to a Greenwich Village apartment in New York in August of 1949, just three months after his death. She was attending New York University and was a student in Bellevue Hospital's physio rehab program. After a neighbor had seen Betsy's car parked on the street for three days, she entered the apartment to find Betsy dead of an apparent pellet rifle shot. 

The note she left said: "...I know this a cowardly thing to do. But the bottom's fallen out since the death of Peter and Bill..." She was 32 and left a mother and sister behind.