Harvey Fletcher

Harvey Fletcher (born September 11, 1884 in Provo , Utah , † July 23, 1981 ibid) was an American physicist.

Life

Fletcher attended Brigham Young High School in his hometown of Provo, which he graduated in 1904. He then attended Brigham Young University (BYU), the largest denominational university in the United States owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (better known as Mormons ). Here he graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1907 . At the University of Chicago he received his doctorate in 1911, his doctoral supervisor was the later Nobel Prize winner in physics Robert Andrews Millikan .

From 1910, Fletcher was instrumental in the work on the Millikan experiment (oil droplet experiment ), with which Millikan determined the elementary charge of the electron for the first time . In the 1980s, the Israeli science historian Alexander Kohn claimed that the idea of ​​using the less rapidly evaporating oil droplets instead of water droplets did not come from Millikan, but from Fletcher. Since Millikan did not mention Fletcher as a co-author in his 1913 publication, he was also not taken into account when the 1923 Nobel Prize was awarded.

Fletcher returned to BYU after completing his doctorate, where he headed the physics faculty until 1916. From 1916 to 1949 he worked for Western Electric at the research center later known as Bell Telephone Laboratories . From 1949 to 1952 he was professor of electrical engineering at Columbia University in New York . He was then director of research and in 1954 the first dean of the newly created College of Physics and Engineering at BYU. From 1958 until his retirement in 1974 he taught physics at BYU, where he continued his research on acoustics until shortly before his death.

In 1935, Harvey Fletcher was elected to the National Academy of Sciences .

Fletcher was married twice. He and his first wife, Lorena Chipman, had a daughter and six sons. The third son, James C. Fletcher (1919–91), was President of the University of Utah and twice head of NASA . After his wife died in 1967, he married her widowed sister Fern Chipman Eyring in 1969. Fletcher was a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He served as President of the New York Congregation for ten years.

research

At Western Electric and Bell, Fletcher worked on hearing aids and telephones , researching speech understanding , hearing volume and frequency groups . In 1934, Fletcher and his team performed one of the first public demonstrations of stereophony .

Publications

• Speech and Hearing , Harvey Fletcher and HD Arnold, New York 1922
• Speech and Hearing in Communication , Harvey Fletcher, Princeton 1953

Individual evidence

1. ^ Short biography on britannica.com, accessed January 5, 2016
2. ↑ In Memory of Harvey Fletcher. In: et.byu.edu, accessed January 4, 2016
3. ^ A Tribute to Harvey Fletcher at et.byu.edu, accessed January 4, 2016