Karl Compton

Karl Taylor Compton (September 14, 1887 – June 22, 1954) was an American physicist and president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1930 to 1948. Compton built much of MIT's modern research enterprise, including systems for technology transfer and federal government research partnerships that became central to United States science and technology policy.

An accomplished professor of nuclear physics at Princeton, Compton was recruited to MIT to promote basic science programs to complement MIT's existing emphasis on vocational training. He consolidated departments into a School of Science, invested in major research projects, and increased faculty autonomy from industry. Along with MIT Chancellor Vannevar Bush, Compton encouraged close connections to the U.S. government's scientific and military apparatus and advocated for federal funding of basic research. These efforts substantially expanded graduate research programs, and his introduction of loan-based financial aid increased undergraduate enrollment. During Compton's years at MIT, students increased 60 percent, employment tripled, and the Institute budget grew twelve-fold.

Compton promoted new methods to bring research discoveries into commercial use. He devised a model for licensing patents from MIT research, which was widely copied by other universities. To support the transition of basic research to high-tech industries, he later co-founded the American Research and Development Corporation, the first modern venture capital fund. Over his career, he wrote and spoke widely about the roles of science and research in economic progress.

Compton led many federal government initiatives to reform military research and development. He was among President Franklin Roosevelt's original appointees to the National Defense Research Committee. His division oversaw the formation of the MIT Radiation Lab and the development of fire control and radar, innovations which gave significant tactical advantages to Allied forces. He led the "Compton Radar Mission" to the United Kingdom and became the scientific advisor to General MacArthur in the Pacific theatre. Returning to the presidency briefly after the war, Compton left MIT to lead a reorganization and expansion of Department of Defense research programs.

He also ventured into major public questions about the military: he was among the first to publicly argue that dropping the atomic bomb spared Japanese and American lives. At President Truman's request, he led a commission report recommending universal military service.

Compton was the founding chairman of the American Institute of Physics, president of the American Society for Engineering Education and a board member at the Ford, Rockefeller, and Sloan Foundations, as well as several other organizations. On his death at age 66, Caltech president Lee DuBridge wrote that "the world had lost one of its greatest scientists, educators, and public servants."

The early years (1887–1912)

Karl Taylor Compton was born in Wooster, Ohio, on September 14, 1887, the eldest of three brothers (including Arthur Compton and Wilson Martindale Compton) and one sister, Mary. His father, Elias Compton, was from an old American Presbyterian family, and his mother, Otelia Augspurger Compton, was from an Alsatian and Hessian Mennonite family that had recently immigrated to the United States. His brother Arthur became a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and sister Mary a missionary.

Beginning in 1897, Compton's summers were spent camping at Otsego Lake, Michigan while attending Wooster public schools in fall, winter and summer. He took hard labor jobs starting at age eleven to help pay for college, working carrying hods for construction projects, as a farm hand, mule skinner, a book canvasser, in tile and brick factories and surveyed the first mile of paved road in Ohio.

In 1902, Compton skipped a grade and went into Wooster University's preparatory department for the last two years of high school. In 1908, he graduated from Wooster ''cum laude'' with a bachelor of philosophy degree. In 1909, his master's thesis, ''A study of the Wehnelt electrolytic interrupter'', was published in ''Physical Review''. During 1909–1910 he was an instructor in Wooster's chemistry department before entering a graduate program at Princeton University.

At Princeton, he received the Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship. Compton and his advisor Owen Willans Richardson published several papers on electrons released by ultraviolet light, electron theory, and on the photoelectric effect. Their 1912 paper in ''Science'' was one of the first verifications of Einstein's 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect. In 1912, Compton received his Ph.D. summa cum laude, a rarely awarded distinction at Princeton.

Teaching career

Reed College and World War I (1913–1918)

In June 1913, Compton married Rowena Raymond. They moved to Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where Compton was an instructor in physics. In 1915, he returned to Princeton as an associate professor of physics. He also took a consultancy at the General Electric Corporation. He contributed to the war effort with the Signal Corps, where he focused on sound-ranging techniques for enemy artillery. In December 1917, Compton was attached to the US Embassy in Paris as an associate science attaché.

Princeton University (1918–1930)

After the Armistice of 1918, the end of World War I, Compton returned home to Princeton, his wife and three-year-old daughter Mary Evelyn. In June 1919, Compton was made a full professor, and worked in the Palmer Laboratory where his gift for teaching was legendary. His research was in the area of electronics and spectroscopy in subject areas such as passage of photoelectrons through metals, ionization, the motion of electrons in gases, fluorescence, theory of the electric arc, absorption and emission spectra of mercury vapor, and collisions of electrons and atoms.

Rowena died in the fall of 1919. In 1921, Compton married Margaret Hutchinson, with whom he had a daughter, Jean, and a son, Charles Arthur.

Compton was a productive researcher and a highly regarded teacher. During his decade at Princeton, over one hundred papers were published in his name in thermionic effects, ultraviolet spectroscopy, and electron physics. While his mentor Richardson was not a strong teacher, Compton's "clear, goal-oriented" instruction was a cornerstone of Princeton's physics program. George R. Harrison later described him as "one of the best physics teachers in the United States."

During the 1920s, Compton became widely known in his profession. In 1923, Compton was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society and in 1924 a member of the National Academy of Sciences for which he was chairman of the Section of Physics (1927–1930). He was named vice-president of the American Physical Society ( APS) in 1925 and in 1927 became its president. Compton was also a fellow of the Optical Society of America, a member of the American Chemical Society, the Franklin Institute and other professional engineering societies. During a fellowship year at the University of Göttingen, Compton met the coterie of young American physicists working under Max Born, including the father of the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Compton's stature in his discipline was rising, as attested by offers he received to leave Princeton. Through the 1920s, the University of Chicago recruited him heavily to maintain research led by A. A. Michelson, eventually proposing to hire both Compton and his brother Arthur. In 1927, Arthur received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the eponymous Compton effect. A year later, Karl Compton's thesis advisor Owen Richardson was also awarded the Nobel in physics for work on thermionic effects. As Princeton fought to retain him, Compton was named director of research at the Palmer Laboratory and Cyrus Fogg Brackett professor. In 1929, he was appointed head of the physics department.

MIT presidency (1930–1954)

In 1930, Compton accepted an invitation from the MIT Corporation to be president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), an engineering school that was redefining the relationship between engineering and science. He took office at the beginning of the Great Depression in America, a time of economic turmoil and a time when science was under attack as a source of "social ills and national despair." Compton was to strengthen basic scientific research at the Institute while becoming a spokesman for science and technology.

During Compton's service as president, the organization went through a revolutionary change. He developed a new approach to education in science and engineering, the influence of which was felt far beyond MIT. Significantly, he was active in the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education, and its president in 1938. He was a leader in establishing new standards for the accreditation of engineering criteria through his role as chairman of the "Committee on Engineering Schools" of the "Engineer's Council for Professional Development". He believed in broad-based education for scientists and engineers that was responsive to the needs of the time, and that science should be an element of industrial progress.

Academic spin-offs

Before Compton's arrival at MIT, industrial sponsors would often license faculty inventions, but it was uncommon for faculty to spin off their own commercial enterprises. Compton sought to encourage direct faculty entrepreneurship through revisions of Institute patent policies and venture capital support. Through the venture fund, American Research and Development Corporation, Compton directly backed several faculty ventures. Later fund investments included the Digital Equipment Corporation, an leading manufacturer of early computers.

American Institute of Physics

In the early 1930s, Compton joined with members of the APS to form the American Institute of Physics ( AIP). While he was chairman of the AIP board during 1931–1936, the organization became a federation of several disparate societies for developing subject areas in physics. It sponsored publication of research results in the rapidly expanding study of physics during that era.

In 1948, Compton resigned his post as President of MIT and was elected chair of the MIT Corporation. He held that position until his death on June 22, 1954.

Cooperation with the military (1933–1949)

In 1933, U.S. President Roosevelt asked Compton to chair a new "Scientific Advisory Board" that lasted two years. This put him into a forefront of scientists that perceived a need for reliable scientific advice at the highest levels of government. The start of World War II motivated the start of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), created in 1940 under the chairmanship of Vannevar Bush. Compton was a member of the NDRC and became head of the division responsible for assembling a group of academic and industrial engineers and scientists that would study primarily radar, fire control and thermal radiation. In 1941, the NDRC was assimilated into the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) where Compton chaired the "United States Radar Mission" to the United Kingdom.

In August 1942, Roosevelt appointed Compton to the "Rubber Survey Committee", which investigated and made recommendations to help resolve conflicts on technical direction in the development of synthetic rubber, arising due to the loss of rubber supply during the war.

In 1945, Compton was selected as one of eight members of the Interim Committee appointed to advise President Harry S. Truman on the use of the atomic bomb. When Japan surrendered in 1945, World War II came to an end and Compton left the OSRD. In 1946, Compton chaired the President's Advisory Commission on Military Training. After a visit to Japan, Compton wrote an article in ''The Atlantic'' entitled "What If The United States Had Never Dropped The Atomic Bomb?" in which he argues that the dropping the bomb saved hundreds of thousands of lives; President Harry S Truman responded in agreement.

From 1946 to 1948, he was a member of the Naval Research Advisory Committee. Compton chaired the Joint Research and Development Board from 1948 to 1949, when he stepped down for health reasons.

Awards and honors

* The Rumford Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1931
* The Presidential Medal for Merit in 1946 for hastening the termination of hostilities by means of the radar research and development program he directed.
* The Public Welfare Medal from the National Academy of Sciences. in 1947 for his eminence in the application of science to the public welfare.
* The Washington Award of the Western Society of Engineers in 1947
* Honorary Commander, Civil Division, of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 1948
* Knight Commander of the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav in 1948
* The Lamme Medal of the American Society for Engineering Education in 1949
* The Hoover Medal jointly from the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers and the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1950
* The William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement of the Scientific Research Society of America in 1950
* Officer in the French Legion of Honor in 1951
* The "Priestley Memorial Award" of Dickinson College in 1954 for his contributions to the "welfare of mankind through physics"

The lunar crater Compton is named after Compton and his brother Arthur, who was also an influential scientist.
Compton was also the recipient of thirty-two honorary degrees.

References

Further reading

* Office Of The National Research Council, Biographical Memoirs, National Academies Press, (October 1, 1992),
* Galison, Peter, and Barton Bernstein. "In any light: Scientists and the decision to build the Superbomb, 1952-1954." ''Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences'' 19.2 (1989): 267–347
online

External links

Photograph of Karl Taylor Compton and other members of the NDRC






Annotated bibliography for Karl Compton from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues

National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir

, -

{{DEFAULTSORT:Compton, Karl Taylor
1887 births
1954 deaths
20th-century American physicists
American Presbyterians
College of Wooster alumni
Manhattan Project people
Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty
Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
Presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Princeton University alumni
U.S. Synthetic Rubber Program
20th-century American academics
Presidents of the American Physical Society
Members of the American Philosophical Society