Richard McLean Badger (4 May 1896 – 26 November 1974) was an American professor at

Caltech The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech) is a private university, private research university in Pasadena, California, United States. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small g ...

and a chemist who specialized in molecular spectroscopy with X rays and infrared radiation. He made pioneering studies on the modes of vibrations and spectral energies in small molecules. The so called Badger's rule relating force and internuclear distance in diatomic molecules is based on his work from 1933. Badger was born in

Elgin, Illinois Elgin ( ) is a city in Cook County, Illinois, Cook and Kane County, Illinois, Kane counties in the U.S. state of Illinois. It is located northwest of Chicago along the Fox River (Illinois River tributary), Fox River. As of the 2020 United Stat ...

to Joseph Stillman who worked at

General Electric General Electric Company (GE) was an American Multinational corporation, multinational Conglomerate (company), conglomerate founded in 1892, incorporated in the New York (state), state of New York and headquartered in Boston. Over the year ...

, and Carrie Mabel Hewitt. Badger spent his early life

Brisbane Brisbane ( ; ) is the List of Australian capital cities, capital and largest city of the States and territories of Australia, state of Queensland and the list of cities in Australia by population, third-most populous city in Australia, with a ...

, Australia, where his father developed its tramway network. He was then sent to school at Elgin grammar school and again briefly in Australia. He joined Northwestern University in 1916 but was posted into the US Army 311st Field Station Battalion in World War I and was demobilized in 1919. He then went to California to continue his education at the Throop Institute of Technology which became the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in the next year. He studied crystals using X ray diffraction and was influenced by

Richard C. Tolman Richard Chace Tolman (March 4, 1881 – September 5, 1948) was an American mathematical physicist and physical chemist who made many contributions to statistical mechanics and theoretical cosmology. He was a professor at the California Ins ...

, Roscoe G. Dickinson, Paul S. Epstein, and Arthur A. Noyes. He received a PhD in 1924 and continued to work as a research fellow. Badger and Tolman worked on examining predictions based on Niels Bohr's ideas. In 1928-29 he visited universities in Germany and studied fluorescence with

James Franck James Franck (; 26 August 1882 – 21 May 1964) was a German-American physicist who received the 1925 Nobel Prize in Physics with Gustav Hertz "for their discovery of the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom". He completed hi ...

in Göttingen. He also worked with

Reinhard Mecke Reinhard Mecke (born 14 July 1895 in Stettin; died 30 December 1969) was a German physicist, who focused on chemical physics. He was one of the pioneers of infrared spectroscopy. Reinhard Mecke studied from 1913 mathematics and physics at the uni ...

in Bonn. He became an assistant professor in 1929 and began to examine hydrogen bonds in organic molecules. During World War II he was also involved in problems coming from the Manhattan Project. He worked alongside

Linus Pauling Linus Carl Pauling ( ; February 28, 1901August 19, 1994) was an American chemist and peace activist. He published more than 1,200 papers and books, of which about 850 dealt with scientific topics. ''New Scientist'' called him one of the 20 gre ...

working on Navy sponsored research but he did not share Pauling's pacifism and anti-nuclear testing stance. Badger married Virginia Alice Sherman in 1933 and they had a son and a daughter. The Badger family home in Brisbane is now heritage-listed.

References

External links

Caltech biography
{{DEFAULTSORT:Badger, Richard McLean 1896 births 1974 deaths People from Elgin, Illinois Military personnel from Illinois American spectroscopists California Institute of Technology alumni Scientists from Illinois Fellows of the American Physical Society