Biographical Memoirs Volume 53 (1982) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 366-400
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From page 367... ...
As with able and versatile men in general, there was a variety of good lives open to Webster; like them all, the path actually chosen was a function of the elaborate complex of unpredictables that we must call "chance." David Webster was born in Boston, ant! New England was stamped on his tongue to the end, as any ear for dialect wouIcI recognize, but it would be wrong just to pronounce him a New England type except as it was typical of nineteenthcentury New Englanclers to resist complete uniformity.
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From page 368... ...
368 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS vanishing at about the mid-seventeenth-century peak of immigration from Britain. All of the names seem English, and Webster has ciroppecl a remark that his ancestors were Puritans from the northeast part of England Yorkshire, Norfolk, and thereabouts and that they left Englancl, bounct for America, about two jumps ahead of the sheriff.
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From page 369... ...
~ was not allowect to play with other children because it was feared ~ might catch germs of one kind or another." ~ When first sent to school at age five, he was completely surprised by the discovery of what it was like to play with * Personal journal of David Locke Webster II, n.d.
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From page 370... ...
370 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS other children. His playmates found that he was under motherly orders to keep his hat on (to avoid fatal pneumonia)
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From page 371... ...
These peripatetic philosophers wasted little time on trivialities and subsequently the chaplain, an inveterate author, expressed in the frontal pages of a book his gratitude for aid received from "Dr. David Webster, ctistinguishect atheist of Stanford University." Until he went to a teaching post at the University of Michigan in his twenty-eighth year, Webster had tract no experience of public education.
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From page 372... ...
BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS 372 background and upbringing would have thought of going to college anywhere else." ~ There is nothing to be found in Webster's papers about his undergraduate years at Harvard and almost nothing in the possession of his family. He came through in the usual four years with the much less usual summa cum laude.
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From page 373... ...
DAVID LOCKE WEBSTER II 373 received appointment to an instructorship. He assembled X-ray equipment and went to work on problems of his own choosing.
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From page 374... ...
But it would have been rash to suppose that all of the electron kinetic energy reappeared as radiation energy. Such uncertainties had a serious importance since these were days when the old quantum theory was out on trial.
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From page 375... ...
earlier by David Webster. Now the writer of this memoir must switch to the first person.
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From page 376... ...
Personal journal of David Locke Webster II.
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From page 377... ...
with the First World War until Armistice as lieutenant and as captain in the air service of the Army. Nearly all of his work was at Langley FielcI, Virginia.
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From page 378... ...
378 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS STANFORD PROBLEMS AND EVENTS In taking up the Stanford professorship (which was to run for thirty-four years) Webster was serving an academic emoloYer Younger than himself and smaller (2,949 students)
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From page 379... ...
In the next year, de Broglie suggested that particles are waves and the arrangements of electrons within atoms became clear. In the year after that, wave mechanics was born.
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From page 380... ...
380 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS proposed and convincingly defended, and Davisson and Germer were experimentally substantiating it for the important case of electrons. In the very next year, Heisenberg declared for uncertainty, shaking the foundations of general philosophies and putting a new one under physics.
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From page 381... ...
DAVID LOCKE WEBSTER II 381 Webster textbook, users agreed that it was extremely hard to find errors in it, even in the first edition. This writer, an avid critic, never succeeded in finding even one.
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From page 382... ...
382 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS But ideas developed faster than the possible testing of them, so he carried many of them to California for consideration in the research laboratory he was expected to develop at Stanford. His personal research efforts on the new job were largely devoted to observation of the bombardment of metallic atoms with electrons and the measurement of the resulting characteristic radiations.
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From page 383... ...
A Ross, about 1925, stepped into the controversial territory of the Compton effect, with clarifying effectiveness.
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From page 384... ...
384 . BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS commercial commitments, and internally competitive ambitions macle it obviously not at home as a subdivision of the small Physics Department.
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From page 385... ...
His airflight competence and enthusiasm tract survived World War I, and he had taught classes in "Air Craft Operation" for the Civil Pilot Training Program of the Federal Civil Aeronautics Administration and hac! come to realize painfully that fliers were still being taught World War ~ superstitions about the physics of flight and how to cope with its vital problems.
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From page 386... ...
386 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS ciation in these fields. It may seem odcI that in the twentieth century physics teachers could not all immediately agree upon what shouIct be saicl about magnets ant!
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From page 387... ...
DAVID LOCKE WEBSTER II 387 and accepted the assignment of putting in orcler the deplorable engineering anc! science physics instructional program, which had slipper!
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From page 388... ...
388 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS of these, the 220-ton Clipper ship Columbia, was the first American vessel to clouble stormy Cape Horn and ply the West Coast waters. She tracled in the American Northwest, where she gave her name to a great river, continuing westward thereafter ant!
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From page 389... ...
DAVID LOCKE WEBSTER II 389 chute jumps with a big umbrella enclec! in crash landings and he remained grounder]
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From page 390... ...
He came to realize, though none too rapidly, that high-cIass power in such physics was an essential condition for the future growth ant! service of a university physics department in either its teaching or its investigative function.
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From page 391... ...
DAVID LOCKE WEBSTER II 391 This wouIcl have been an appropriate time to swing the research emphasis of the Department into one of the new productive channels, but Webster preferred to carry on with X-ray observations using more energetic collisions. This simple-sounding extension wouIct have required far bigger budgets than the Department tract ever seen; Webster went to the foundations for such support and was turned clown.
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From page 392... ...
David Webster was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1923.
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From page 393... ...
Rev., 6:54. 1916 The emission quanta of characteristic X-rays.
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From page 394... ...
Soc.,82:181-82. The penetration of cathode rays in molybdenum, and its effect on the X-ray spectrum.
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From page 395... ...
Rev., 27:638. 1927 Direct and indirect ejection of K electrons by cathode rays.
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From page 396... ...
Probabilities of K-electron ionization of silver by cathode rays.
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From page 397... ...
Probabilities of K-electron ionization of silver by cathode rays.
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From page 398... ...
Cram. Civil Pilot Training Manual, Civil Aeronautics Bull.
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From page 399... ...
DAVID LOCKE WEBSTER II 399 With L
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From page 400... ...
400 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS 1972 With A
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