Edward Eisner

FRSE Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) is an award granted to individuals that the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's national academy of science and Literature, letters, judged to be "eminently distinguished in their subject". ...

FIP (20 December 1929 – 25 December 1987) was a Hungarian-born physicist who was Professor of Applied Physics at the

University of Strathclyde The University of Strathclyde () is a public research university located in Glasgow, Scotland. Founded in 1796 as the Andersonian Institute, it is Glasgow's second-oldest university, having received its royal charter in 1964 as the first techn ...

from 1968 to 1987. He specialised in the physics of sound. The "Edward Eisner Memorial Fund Award" is named in his honour.

Life

He was born in

Sárvár Sárvár ( or ; ; ) is a town in Vas County, Hungary. Sárvár lies on the banks of the River Rába at Kemeneshát. The population is nearly 16,000. The town has become a tourist centre of international renown. Etymology ''Sár'' means "mud" i ...

Hungary Hungary is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning much of the Pannonian Basin, Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croatia and ...

on 20 December 1929. He came to Britain with his family in the 1930s and attended the Herbert Strutt School in

Belper Belper () is a town and civil parish in the local government district of Amber Valley in Derbyshire, England, located about north of Derby on the River Derwent. Along with Belper, the parish includes the village of Milford and the hamlets ...

Derbyshire Derbyshire ( ) is a ceremonial county in the East Midlands of England. It borders Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, and South Yorkshire to the north, Nottinghamshire to the east, Leicestershire to the south-east, Staffordshire to the south a ...

from 1939. He won a place at

Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge Gonville and Caius College, commonly known as Caius ( ), is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1348 by Edmund Gonville, it is the fourth-oldest of the University of Cambridge's 31 colleges and ...

, to study Physics and graduated BA in 1950, gaining a doctorate (PhD) in 1954. From 1954 he worked with the Ministry of Power at Buxton. In 1960 he went to America to work with the Bell Telephone Laboratory in

New Jersey New Jersey is a U.S. state, state located in both the Mid-Atlantic States, Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern United States, Northeastern regions of the United States. Located at the geographic hub of the urban area, heavily urbanized Northeas ...

, working on the improvement of handsets. In 1968 he returned to Britain to take the chair in Applied Physics at Strathclyde University retaining this role until death. He was replaced by Prof Gordon Donaldson. In 1969 he infamously wrote an open letter to NASA suggesting how to improve their television broadcasts from the Moon. In 1977 he was elected a Fellow of the

Royal Society of Edinburgh The Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) is Scotland's national academy of science and letters. It is a registered charity that operates on a wholly independent and non-partisan basis and provides public benefit throughout Scotland. It was establis ...

. His proposers were Kenneth Jack Standley, Nicholas Kemmer, Simon G G MacDonald, and William Cochran. He died on Christmas Day 1987.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Eisner, Edward 1929 births 1987 deaths 20th-century British physicists Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Alumni of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge Academics of the University of Strathclyde Hungarian emigrants to the United Kingdom People educated at the Herbert Strutt School