Clan William: Physicist DeWitt Bristol Brace, PhD

Today's subject is the incredible pioneer scientist, DeWitt Bristol Brace, PhD. He was a brilliant physics professor and researcher who died young. Makes me wonder what he could have done had he lived a full life.

Capt Thomas Munson > Samuel Munson > Samuel James Munson > William Munson > Peter Munson > Lydia Munson > William Zelus Bristol > Emily Cowles Bristol > DeWitt Bristol Brace, PhD

DeWitt Bristol Brace was born to Emily Cowles Bristol, our Munson descendant, and C. Lusk Brace near Wilson, Niagara County, New York on 05 Jan 1859. Lusk was a farmer and later a Lockport mill operator. Lusk and Emily had four children, DeWitt being the second son and child.

DeWitt received both his bachelor's and master's degrees from Boston College in 1881-1882. He then studied under Dr. Henry Augustus Rowland at Johns Hopkins University for two years. He then went to Berlin, Germany to study under Dr Hermann Helmholtz and Dr Gustav Kirchhoff at the University of Berlin. He received his PhD in 1885 in Berlin after he completed his dissertation on the magnetic rotation of the plane of polarization.

Dr Brace returned to the US, he traveled to the University of Michigan, where he spent a year as an assistant professor of physics. 

Old Physics Lab at UNL

The University of Nebraska at Lincoln was founded in 1869 and built in a four block section of the city. It's farm campus was built in 1873, outside of the city of Lincoln on the prairie. In the beginning, the science department was not divided into specialties like Chemistry and Physics. It was the first university west of the Missisippi to offer a doctoral program. There apparently was a bias in eastern academic circles that the western education insitutions were inferior in both the academic backgrounds of its faculty and its research capabilities. DeWitt helped dispell this myth when he arrived to take a full professorship in 1887. Part of his charge was to create a physics department.

Research had not necessarily been a big deal at UNL, but Brace believed that such research was critical to the operation of the University. He believed strongly that higher education centers must develop research.  His own research led to great distinction for the University. With a growing reputation, Brace used his clout to lobby for updated equipment, laboratories, facilities, and money for research. He built a very strong Physics department but the department still needed a home on campus. 

UNL Physics Staff 1905
UNL Library Archives

 "Brace also began building a graduate program and hired two additional instructors in 1896, Burton Evans Moore and Louis Trenchard More. A few years later Clarence Aurelius Skinner and John Edwin Almy were also added to the physics faculty. In 1896 one of Brace's students, Harold Allen, was awarded a Ph.D. degree by the University of Nebraska. This was the very first Ph.D. given by any school west of the Mississippi. With one or two exceptions, no further Ph.D.s were given until the present Ph.D. program in physics was initiated after World War II. The photograph on the left shows members of the Physics Department in May 1905 in front of the old Nebraska Hall, which is where the Department was housed until it moved into Brace Laboratory later that year." https://www.unl.edu/physics/department-history

DeWitt made a special study of radiation and optics and published, "The Laws of Radiation and Absorption," in 1901. Life in Nebraska was good. His mother lived with him and had been with him for many years. But, it was time to focus on more than just science. That same year, he went east to marry Iowa native Elizabeth Wing on 16 Oct 1901 in West Newton, Massachusetts. The couple returned to Lincoln and began their family.

Lincoln Journal Star, 12 Oct 1901, p 6

In addition to securing several patents in the course of his research, his body of work had continued to grow as evidenced here: 

"Brace’s own contributions to physical science were almost exclusively in the domain of optics. By the invention of his sensitive-strip polarizer, and his half-shade elliptic polarizer, he extended the range of observation far beyond that previously attained, and he devised and partly executed many experiments in which this increased sensitiveness could be used in the study of fundamental optical problems. Returning to the question which he dealt with in his first published paper, he succeeded in showing that the beam of polarized light which undergoes rotation in a magnetic field is susceptible of resolution into two circularly polarized beams. He showed that, to a very high order of sensitiveness, no effect is impressed upon a ray of light by a magnetic field, if its lines of force are at right angles to the ray. He showed that, up to the third order of the ratio of the velocities, no double refraction could be observed in a medium due to its motion through the ether. He planned and tested a method for determining the velocity of light, from which he expected still greater accuracy than that attained in the classical researches of Michelson and Newcomb. He executed several repetitions, with greatly improved instrumental appliances, of classical experiments bearing on the fundamental question of the relative motion of matter and the ether."  ~ © American Astronomical Society • Provided by the NASA Astrophysics Data System

Brace fought mightily to get a building in which to house the Physics department. The Regents approved $75,000 for a new building. Brace guided it's development and building with the construction team. Then he hit a roadblock when the all powerful athletics department which believed the building was perilously close to its football field. To keep things on track, Brace altered the footprint of the building. Progress on the new building with its state of the art laboratories continued through 1904 and 1905. 

At the beginning of the 1905 school year in September of that year, Brace became ill. He developed septicemia believed to have stemmed from an infection in having a carbuncle removed from his face (an infected boil)  and would die on 02 Oct 1905, having never seen the completion of the project. The school named the building the Brace Physics building in his honor. Much of his research would not be completed by Brace, leaving other physicists to continue his work. Today's Physics Chair, Dr Dan Claes, believes that Brace's research provided a result that "contributed to Einstein's theory of relativity."

New Brace Physical Science Building
(Click to enlarge)

From 1903 to 1905, the Brace's had three children born to them. The youngest, Alice, was born after her father's death in 1905. 

Dr. DeWitt Brace, wife Emily, Lloyd and Roger Brace about
1905. UNL Library Archives

Mrs. Brace moved to Massachusetts after her husband's death and her children would be educated at top East Coast schools as far from the prairie as they could be.

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.