Louis Smullin

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Louis Dijour Smullin (born February 5, 1916 in Detroit , † June 4, 2009 in Newton (Massachusetts) ) was an American electrical engineer.

family

His parents were Isaac M. Smullin (May 15, 1887 - December 12, 1965) and Ida May (born June 11, 1887 in Russia) from Detroit. His father was a lawyer for the communist International Labor Defense , got involved in Detroit with Th. L. Poindexter in the Roumanian Workers Educational Association of America around 1938 and founded the later Worker's Camp . In 1957 the parents were heard by the Subcommittee on Soviet Activity in the United States.

Life

"Lou" attended the local Wayne University for two years and then moved to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he received his BSE in electrical engineering in 1936. After two years of working in industry, he enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in 1939 earned a Master of Science degree for his work The Acceleration and Focusing of Electrons in Multi-Stage Tubes with John G. Trump . In June he married Ruth Frankel († 2011).

In 1936 he had worked as a draftsman for the Swift Electric Welder Company for a few months . At the Ohio Brass company in Barberton , he conducted high-voltage tests on TML insulators for two years. He operated a test station for radio interference and used transformer isolators with 150 kV. After MIT he went to Farnsworth Television and Radio Corporation in Fort Wayne , south of the Great Lakes. Here he designed and tested photomultiplier tubes. After the outbreak of war and restrictions, he moved to the Scintilla Magneto Division of Bendix Aviation in Sidney (New York) in 1940 , where electric starters were built for aircraft and Smullin designed test instruments for ignition systems. Soon Susan was born to four children.

During the war, Trump appointed him to the MIT Radiation Laboratory (Rad Lab) in 1941 , where Smullin became head of the Radiation Laboratory TR and the Duplexer Section. The group developed methods for testing transmit-receive microwave tubes for over 3 GHz and devised most of the radar duplexers by the end of the war. He then worked briefly at the Federal Telecommunications Laboratory .

In 1947 he returned to the institute to organize and run the Microwave Tube Laboratory of the research laboratory for electronics. He helped plan and set up the MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, which MIT President JR Killian had opposed in 1951. In 1952 he became head of the radar and weapons department at Lincoln Lab. In 1955 he returned to the Cambridge campus as an associate professor of electrical engineering and was appointed professor in 1960. In 1959 the plasma physicist Abraham Bers was his doctoral student. Smullin became the head of the Active Plasma Systems Group of the Electronics Research Laboratory. After the invention of the ruby ​​laser, he transmitted on the evenings of September 9-11. May 1962 together with the atmospheric physicist Giorgio Fiocco , in the experiment Project Luna See , for the first time laser pulses to the moon, where they discovered their return and were able to determine the moon distance. Fiocco developed it further into Lidar .

From 1966 to February 1974 he was head of the electrical engineering department. One of his inventions enabled the study of regulated thermonuclear mergers. In 1972 he hired Bob Fano and Millie Dresselhaus , who had four young children to look after, as Associate Department Heads . Barbara Liskov followed as the second woman . Erich P. Ippen had to organize the open day at the start. In 1968 he was made a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

After 1974, he returned to teaching and helped establish the MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department (EECS) until the 1980s . Meanwhile, his son David had gone to Alaska after completing his master's degree in biology, where he was promptly adopted by an Eskimo family.

In an interview with RR Romanowski on May 15, 1982 he stated: “This was the last was probably, for which there was genuine enthusiasm, if that's the right word. It was clear who the villain was. It was clearly a war that had to be won. . . . And we were young. ”
After his retirement in 1986, he cycled to the institute every day to continue his work on cold fusion research until he suffered a stroke in 2001. He died eight years later in the Lasell House nursing home in Newton.

Memberships

  • American Physical Society
  • American Society of Arts and Sciences
  • National Academy of Engineering
  • Eta Kappa Nu
  • Sigma Xi

Publications

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bostonglobe/obituary.aspx?pid=149202537
  2. ↑ http://genealogy.math.uni-bielefeld.de/id.php?id=66027  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / genealogy.math.uni-bielefeld.de  
  3. ↑ https://www.cnr.it/en/news/5336/giorgio-fiocco-un-pioniere-della-fisica-dell-atmosfera
  4. ^ The University: Proceedings of the Board of Regents. The University, 1969, p. 248 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  5. ↑ https://eecs-newsletter.mit.edu/articles/2009-fall/remembering-louis-dijour-smullin-1916-2009/
  6. ↑ APS Fellow Archive , accessed October 1, 2017.
  7. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original dated August 12, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  ; https://www.csw.org/page/News-Detail?pk=985631&fromId=197061 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / osucascades.edu
personal data
SURNAME Smullin, Louis
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Smullin, Louis Dijour (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American electrical engineer
DATE OF BIRTH February 5, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH Detroit
DATE OF DEATH June 4, 2009
Place of death Newton (Massachusetts)