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Harrison M. Randall at his Infrared Spectrograph around 1914. Randall was born in Michigan in 1870, earned his Ph.D.
at Michigan in 1902, and chaired the Physics Department until his retirement in 1941.
The Department's main building bears
his name. |
| Ernest Barker amazes the public with
a demonstration of infrared spectroscopy in or around 1938. He chaired the department from 1941-1955. |
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H. R. Crane tends to his 1,000,000 electron volt linear
accelerator in 1938. The particle beam ran down the tube at left to a detector room
below. Five 200,000 volt units at the right provided the accelerating voltage.
Those retro-looking rings were to suppress unwanted discharges. Randall Lab is
unique in that it has three basement levels. This photo was taken from the
sub-basement level, and a basement-level door is visible in the background. The
detector room was in the sub-sub basement. |
Paul Weyrich at his ruling engine around 1940.
This machine scribed precise groves into an optical surface to make diffraction gratings--devices for splitting light into its component wavelengths. Today you can see the effect with much less effort and expense just by looking at the bottom side of a compact disk, but at the time, Michigan's gratings were in demand worldwide. |
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W. Louisell, Glenn Edict, and George Grover tend to
Michigan's electron synchrotron, circa 1948. |
| Donald Glaser poses with his bubble chamber in 1953.
Legend has it that this Nobel Prize-winning particle trail detector was inspired by
bubbles in the beer at a now-defunct local tavern. |
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 | A historic picture of West Hall. |
