Arthur Kantrowitz

Arthur Robert Kantrowitz (born October 20, 1913 in New York City ; died November 29, 2008 there ) was an American engineer and university professor .

Life

Kantrowitz was born in New York City in 1913. His mother was a costume designer and his father ran a clinic in the Bronx . As a child, Kantrowitz and his brother Adrian Kantrowitz (who later performed the first heart transplant in the USA) built an electrocardiograph from old radio parts.

While studying in Columbia, Kantrowitz began working as a physicist for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) in 1936 . Kantrowitz was supervised by Edward Teller during his doctorate . He then taught at Cornell University for the next ten years and founded the Avco-Everett Research Lab (AERL) in Everett, Massachusetts in 1955. He developed shock tubes capable of generating the extremely hot gases required to simulate atmospheric re-entry from orbit, thereby solving the problem of critical re-entry heating of the spacecraft nose and speeding up the development of a reusable spacecraft. He was director, chief executive officer and chairman of AERL until he was appointed professor at Dartmouth College in 1978 . He was also Vice President and Director of Avco Corporation from 1956 to 1978 .

Kantrowitz was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 1957), the American Association for the Advancement of Science , the American Astronautical Society , the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (honorary), the American Physical Society , the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences (since 1966) and the International Academy of Astronautics. Between 1953 and 1954 he had received both Fulbright and Guggenheim scholarships at the University of Cambridge and the University of Manchester .

Kantrowitz was an honorary trustee of the University of Rochester , an honorary member of the Board of Governors of the Technion and an honorary professor at the Huazhong Institute of Technology in Wuhan, China. Kantrowitz was also a member of the advisory board of the Foresight Institute , an organization dedicated to the development of nanotechnology.

Kantrowitz held 21 patents and authored more than 200 scientific publications and articles. He was also a co-author of the book Fundamentals of Gas Dynamics .

Kantrowitz died on November 29, 2008 at the age of 95 while visiting relatives in New York. He had had a heart attack the day before .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race . ISBN 978-0-06-236359-6 .

Web links

• Biographies of Aerospace Officials and Policymakers, KN . In: NASA History Division . Archived from the original on September 28, 2006. Retrieved August 15, 2006.
• John, Jr. Johnson: Arthur R. Kantrowitz, 1913-2008: Noted physicist and inventor .
• The Papers of Arthur R. Kantrowitz . In: Rauner Special Collections Library . Dartmouth College .
• Arthur Kantrowitz . In: Biography . Encyclopedia Astronautica .
• Andrew Pakhomov: Arthur Kantrowitz, Founder of Laser Propulsion . American Institute of Beamed Energy Propulsion (AIBEP). November 29, 2008. Archived from the original on February 7, 2009.
• The Weapon of Openness . Foresight Institute .