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AR T H U R R . K A N T RO W I T Z
1913–2008
Elected in 1977
“For leadership in the fields of gas dynamics,
magnetohydro-dynamics, and bioengineering.”
BY FRANCIS E. KENNEDY
SUBMITTED BY THE NAE HOME SECRETARY
ARTHUR R. KANTROWITZ, an innovative and forward-
looking physicist and engineer whose accomplishments
ranged from aviation and space to medicine and public policy,
died on November 29, 2008, at the age of 95. He had been the
founder and longtime director of the Avco-Everett Research
Laboratory and was professor emeritus at the Thayer School
of Engineering at Dartmouth College.
Arthur Kantrowitz was born in New York City (in the
Bronx) on October 20, 1913, the eldest child of Bernard and
Rose Kantrowitz. During his youth he developed a love of
science in general and physics in particular. He graduated from
DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx and went on to study
physics at Columbia University, receiving his B.S. in 1934 and
M.A. in 1936. He then went to work for the National Advisory
Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the predecessor of the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), at
Langley Field in Virginia. One of the experiments he did while
at NACA was the first known attempt of a thermonuclear
fusion reaction. In 1938, Arthur and his supervisor, Eastman
Jacobs, heated hydrogen with radio waves while constricting
the gas with a magnetic field in order to achieve fusion.
Although the experiment was not successful, and the project
was canceled by the laboratory director before further attempts
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126 MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
could be made, it was the first of many research activities in
which Arthur was well ahead of others in his research fields.
While at NACA, Arthur also designed the first meaningful
supersonic wind tunnel in the United States (which achieved
Mach number 2.5 in 1942), and his research on shockwave
formation, propagation, and stability in supersonic flows
made important contributions to turbine engine development
and the war effort. During his time at NACA, he continued his
graduate studies at Columbia on the subject of gas dynamics.
His dissertation adviser was Edward Teller, and his doctoral
research involved the measurement of vibrational relaxation
times of carbon dioxide molecules using simple aeronautical
instrumentation. His Ph.D. in physics was awarded by
Columbia in 1947.
In 1946, before completing his Ph.D. dissertation, Arthur
Kantrowitz was appointed to a faculty position in the
Departments of Aeronautical Engineering and Engineering
Physics at Cornell University. He established a very active
laboratory at Cornell, where he and his students did
groundbreaking research on supersonic nozzle flows, high-
temperature (over 10,000 K) shock tubes, and molecular
beams. The supersonic high-intensity “nozzle beam” method
developed by Arthur and his students at Cornell was critical to
the research of at least nine Nobel Prize winners, most notably
Yuan Tseh Lee and Dudley Herschbach (1986) and John Fenn
(2002). Arthur proved to be an inspiring teacher and research
adviser at Cornell. A number of his outstanding students later
played important roles in the aerospace industry and in higher
education.
While at a cocktail party at Cornell in 1954, Arthur met
Victor Emanuel, chairman of Avco Corporation, who told him
about a difficult problem being encountered in the design of
ballistic missiles. The missiles would have to be able to survive
reentry into the atmosphere, where frictional drag could
cause surface temperatures to reach 7,500 K or higher, but
American missile engineers had not yet been able to duplicate
those high-temperature conditions in the laboratory. Arthur
informed him that he and his students had been able to achieve
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AR T H U R R . K A N T RO W I T Z 127
even higher temperatures in their laboratory using shock
tubes, which had the added advantage of producing shock
waves of the type that might be encountered by the missiles
during reentry. Mr. Emanuel immediately set up a meeting
with General Bernard Schriever, head of the U.S. Air Force
ballistic missile program, who agreed to fund a six-month
“crash program” to investigate the shock tube idea. Avco set
up a new research lab, the Avco Everett Research Laboratory
(AERL), at which the work would be carried out. Arthur took
a leave of absence from Cornell to direct the laboratory and
oversee the research program, and he recruited a number of
his recent Cornell graduate students to carry out the work. The
research was so successful that AERL accelerated the research
program on reentry physics, and in 1956 Arthur resigned from
his tenured faculty position at Cornell to remain as director
of AERL and to become a vice president of Avco. Subsequent
research under Arthur’s guidance at AERL on shockwave
kinetics, heat transfer rates for blunt body stagnation points,
and nonequilibrium radiation contributed greatly to further
development of ablative heat shields for missiles and later for
manned spacecraft, and Avco became a leading producer of
heat shields for space applications.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Arthur Kantrowitz recruited
many outstanding engineers and scientists to AERL. He
mentored and motivated them to significant achievements in a
number of research areas. Dr. Kantrowitz always maintained
that while most universities engaged in pure research, he was
interested in “impure research”—that is, work that would
lead to practical results, science that made an impact on the
real world. Under his guidance, AERL researchers attempted
to focus their activities on areas in which they could create
a unique capability. He provided overall guidance for each
research project, and important technical contributions in
many cases, and he ensured that innovation and professional
excellence were hallmarks of all research at AERL. Among
the many areas in which significant advances were made at
AERL under Arthur’s guidance were magnetohydrodynamic
(MHD) power generation, superconducting magnets, high-
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power laser development, laser propulsion, and artificial heart
assist devices.
MHD research at AERL was aimed at developing a highly
efficient electric power generator that used hot gases flowing
at supersonic speeds to produce megawatts of electric power.
The concept was proven at AERL in 1959; subsequent research
and development efforts at AERL and Avco resulted in a
combustion-powered MHD generator that laid the foundation
for much of the later development of MHD generators in the
United States and elsewhere. During the development of MHD
power generation systems at AERL, research there under
Arthur Kantrowitz’s guidance also resulted in a stabilized
superconducting magnet, the first demonstration of which
occurred at AERL in 1964.
Under Arthur’s leadership, AERL pioneered in the
development of high average power lasers. Gas dynamic lasers,
electric discharge lasers, and chemical lasers were developed
at AERL, many of them to the megawatt class, in the 1960s
and 1970s. Many of these advances emanated from the basic
principles of gas dynamics that Arthur had developed in his
Ph.D. research. The research expertise at AERL in chemical
kinetics and plasma physics and the experimental capabilities
in shock tube studies of high-velocity, reacting flow fields
proved to be well suited for the nascent field of high-power
lasers. After successful development of high-power lasers at
AERL, Arthur turned his attention to using the newly developed
lasers for rocket propulsion, in which a ground-based laser
would be used to move a payload into low-Earth orbit. His
far-reaching vision had high-powered lasers providing the
key to affordable access to outer space. A proof-of-concept
experiment and scaling analysis were accomplished at AERL
in the 1970s.
When Arthur Kantrowitz was a young man, he and his
brother Adrian, who became one of the world’s foremost
cardiac surgeons, had a dream that they could design an
artificial heart. Arthur continued to pursue that dream while
at AERL, where he assembled a multidisciplinary team to
work toward the goal of an implantable cardiac replacement
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AR T H U R R . K A N T RO W I T Z 129
device. They initially collaborated with Adrian Kantrowitz on
the development of an auxiliary left ventricle, which suffered
from blood clotting problems after being implanted in
humans for the first time in 1966. Arthur and his team decided
to explore the relationship between fluid mechanics and the
chemistry of blood clotting to solve the clotting problems.
This led to the intra-aortic balloon pump, a streamlined
counter-pulsation pump that required minimal surgery for
use in humans. Though a balloon concept had been attempted
earlier, development of a safe and reliable device relied on
understanding the dynamics of using a light fluid, in this
case carbon dioxide, to move blood, a heavy fluid, around the
body. The intra-aortic balloon pump developed at AERL in
1967 resulted from the unique contributions in engineering,
fluid mechanics, chemistry, and medicine from members of
the team Arthur had assembled and led. The AERL balloon
pump was brought to clinical use by a close collaboration with
Massachusetts General Hospital and is still in clinical use today,
more than four decades after its introduction. The device has
been used in more than 3 million patients around the world,
including Arthur Kantrowitz himself after he suffered a heart
attack in November 2008.
In 1978, Arthur reached Avco’s mandatory retirement age,
and he left to take a position as professor of engineering at
the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College. He
continued to give lectures on gas dynamics, MHD, and lasers,
but his primary focus moved to the role of the scientific and
engineering communities in the public perception of technology.
He proposed a new norm for the scientific community: “Any
scientist who addresses the public or lay officials on scientific
facts bearing on public policy should stand ready to publicly
answer questions not only from the public, but from expert
adversaries in the scientific community.” To implement this
norm, he proposed and tried to develop scientific adversary
procedures, known as the “Science Court.” In those procedures,
anyone making an allegedly scientific assertion that was
important for public policy could be challenged to publicly
answer scientific questions from an expert representative of
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those who opposed the assertion. As a member of President
Gerald Ford’s Advisory Group on Anticipated Advances in
Science and Technology and chairman of his Presidential
Task Force on the Science Court (1978), Arthur had the
opportunity to develop his idea to help provide a factual
basis for policymaking. While at Dartmouth he continued to
advance the Science Court procedure as a means to find the
best-available scientific facts, and the limitations of scientific
knowledge, to bear on important controversial issues.
Arthur Kantrowitz was the recipient of many awards
and honors during his lifetime. In addition to the National
Academy of Engineering, he was a member of the National
Academy of Sciences and was a fellow of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society,
the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the
American Association for the Advancement of Science, and
the American Astronautical Society. He was both a Fulbright
and a Guggenheim fellow, and in 1967 he was presented the
Theodore Roosevelt Distinguished Service Medal by President
Lyndon Johnson. He was an honorary trustee of the University
of Rochester; an honorary life member of the Board of
Governors of the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology); and
an honorary professor of the Huazhong Institute of Technology
in Wuhan, China. He was a member of the advisory board of
television’s popular Nova program and a director of the Hertz
Foundation. He served the U.S. government on advisory
boards for President Ford’s White House, the U.S. Department
of Commerce, NASA, the U.S. General Accounting Office,
and the National Science Foundation. He was granted 21 U.S.
patents and published extensively.
A man of many interests and talents, Arthur developed
a love for classical music, literature, and sailing. He was as
well versed in Beethoven and Shakespeare as he was in gas
dynamics. He relished sailing off the coast of Maine on his
beloved 33-foot sloop, ARK.
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Arthur is survived by his second wife, Lee Stuart (of
Hanover, New Hampshire, and Amelia Island, Forida);
three daughters—Barbara Kantrowitz (of New York City),
Lore Kantrowitz (of Lexington, Massachusetts), and Andrea
Kantrowitz (of Pelham, New York); and six grandchildren.
Arthur Kantrowitz was a compassionate and gracious
person and was generous to his colleagues and employees.
His innovative spirit, visionary instinct, outstanding
achievements, and courage in breaking new ground will long
be remembered.
