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. 

SIDEROAD RIPLEY: Tragedy Follows...Again and Again

Wm Ripley Dorr

WILLIAM RIPLEY > JOHN RIPLEY > JOSHUA RIPLEY > JOSHUA II RIPLEY > JOSHUA  RIPLEY, JR >  NATHANIEL RIPLEY > WILLIAM YOUNG RIPLEY > JULIA RIPLEY DORR > WILLIAM RIPLEY DORR m Helen Miller "Nellie" Thurston > CYRUS "Bud" Thurston DORR

I was doing a little dabbling a few months ago and ran across a Find a Grave for Cyrus Thurston Dorr, the son of William Ripley Dorr, who was the son of Julia Ripley Dorr, the noted author and daughter of the business titan, William Young Ripley of Vermont.

A group called "Missing In America" had located and identified Cyrus' remains, which had been left unclaimed in a Nashville mortuary since 1918 and had his ashes interred at Ft Leavenworth, with full military  honors, along with the remains of several others whom the project located and had interred in 2011.

As a veteran, and as the former wife of a career man, the specter of military suicide has always been of special concern to me. When we have so many of our young men and women taking their lives during or after service, it makes me quake with anger that the awareness and treatment options for our service members are so incredibly lacking and the stigma that still persists stifles great strides in treated our psychically wounded warriors. It made me incredibly sad to think of Cyrus' remains and what caused them to sit, untouched, for several generations and I needed to understand why.

The progeny of William Young Ripley were legend. The lineage is chock full of leaders, business luminaries, and adventurers. William Ripley Dorr, the offspring of Julia Ripley Dorr and Seneca Milo Dorr, was no exception.  Raised in Rutland, Vermont, the ancestral hometown of this branch of Ripley's, he was educated at Norwich University, where he graduated in 1873.

He moved on to Appleton, Wisconsin, where the lumber business was booming and started his life there. Upon hearing of the death of his father in 1884, he returned to Vermont and entrenched himself in the various business interests of the family, including his father's brokerage firm, S. M. Dorr Sons.

Eventually, he moved on to St Paul, Minnesota, where his business acumen was targeted at a number of businesses from gold mining to insurance. In addition to many business interested, he was also President of the Chamber of Commerce in St Paul for many years.  In 1890, he married Helen Thurston, a young woman born in Iowa. From 1891-1900, the couple had four children, Seneca Milo dying in infancy. Once they began getting to the age where they needed an education, William relocated the family to New Jersey so the children would be educated in eastern schools.

In 1904, he  was sent to Chicago as a representative of the American Car Company, and while on business there, he took ill and died suddenly. After William's death, Helen moved to St Paul once more. She passed away in Spokane, Washington in 1922.

Cyrus, the second of four children, was born 30 May 1893 in St Paul, Minnesota. By 1915 he was in Silver Bow, Montana, where he married Kathryn Helen Carpenter on 15 Oct 1915. Kathryn was born in Dec 1893 in Houghton County, Michigan.

Kathryn's family included her parents, William Esau Carpenter and his wife Margaret "Maggie" Sullivan.  Married in 1891, the couple had at least six children, of which Kathryn was the second child.

The Carpenter's young life was marred by tragedy. In 1902, their 3-year-old daughter, Gladys drowned in a nearby waterway while following her siblings as they went to school. In 1907, 4-year-old Fred died of infantile convulsions. It was after this death the couple pulled up stakes and moved to Montana. While there, their 17-year-old daughter, Margaret, died of typhoid in 1913. Son Chellis would become a lawyer and reside in California and daughter Lydia would go on to teach domestic sciences.

Kathryn and Bud had a daughter almost immediately. Named after his grandmother, Julia Caroline Ripley Dorr, young Julia was born 5 Jul 1916 in Broken Bow. From here, things get murky because there is no trace of Cyrus.

It's now 1918 and the war is raging in Europe. Everyone was contributing to the war effort in any way they could. Suddenly, though, Kathryn becomes ill with Scarlet Fever and dies at the home of her parents on 19 April. Both husband and daughter are mentioned in the obit, but at the time, Bud was living in Kansas City, selling bonds.

On 8 Jun 1918, Bud married Margaret Poncelette in Kansas City.  Just in time for him to report to duty on 2 Jul 1918 with the US Marine Aviation Corps at the Philadelphia Shipyards.

He visited his cousin JD Steele in Appleton, Wisconsin,  while on furlough, 24 Aug 1918. Presumably furlough was taken from Great Lakes Naval Air Station. We see no word of Bud until next we hear of his death. The first report to his widow in Kansas City, Margaret, lacked details as to the cause of death. The second posting regarding his death, published in Appleton, indicated it was an accidental death, yet, the article posted in Nashville bared the truth of the matter - suicide.

No interment was made and the ashes were never retrieved. No mention is made of Bud's second wife Margaret. Margaret, through much of the 1920s, remained a widow. What became of her, I don't know.

Mother Helen was alive and living in St Paul when he died, yet one of the articles refers to "parents" - William was long dead.

William & Maggie Carpenter raised their granddaughter Julia, in Montana. Julia married Robert A. Mohr and had at least two daughters. They divorced. The 23-years-older Julia married young naval man, Gail A. Brownlow in 1962. Reportedly, she died of COPD two days after their transfer from Hawaii to El Paso, Texas.

What did I learn from this foray into the life of a veteran who succumbed to suicide? I learned nothing about what drove the man to this permanent solution. Did whatever darkness he carried impact his first marriage? Did he see himself as a failure? Was there some rift with second wife Margaret? What I do understand, is suicide is rarely ever just about one thing.

Why did no one go pick up the ashes? Clearly it was known where they were. Was the stigma of suicide too great? Was the family in disagreement of what would become of his remains? We'll never know, but thanks to the Missing in America project, this Marine received full honors and a very belated burial.

Things look like they might be changing. The Department of Veteran's Affairs, claims the prevention of suicide is the top clinical priority. Let's hope.