Lewis Branscomb with the instrument he developed to measure the absorption of light by hydrogen ions.
Credit: NIST
Lewis Branscomb, the director of the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) from 1969 to 1972, died in May at 96 years old. He led teams of scientists to pioneering discoveries, and when he left the agency, now known as National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), he was only 45, yet he had already clocked more professional achievements than most experience in a lifetime.
To go far it helps to start early, and Branscomb did that. He graduated from Duke University with a physics degree in 1945, when he was 19 years old, and earned his Ph.D. in mathematical physics from Harvard University four years later. He joined NBS in 1951 and immediately set out to prove a theory about the Sun.
That theory had been derived from mathematical and physical principles, but no one had yet succeeded in making the difficult measurements needed to prove it. In the roiling atmosphere of the Sun, the theory held, charged atoms, or ions, of hydrogen absorbed some of the Sun’s radiation, changing the wavelengths of light that reach us here on Earth. To prove the theory, Branscomb would have to measure the absorption of light by hydrogen ions in the lab.
This would have been relatively easy a decade later, when he could have used a laser as a light source. But lasers hadn’t been invented yet, so Branscomb built a complex measurement apparatus that at one point combined the arc lamp of a cinema projector with the red and green lenses of a traffic light.
It took Branscomb three years to make the measurement, and he did confirm the theory about the Sun. More importa ..
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