Raymond Herb

Raymond "Ray" George Herb (born January 22, 1908 in Wisconsin ; † October 1, 1996 ) was an American physicist who dealt with nuclear physics and the development of electrostatic generators .

Herb grew up on a small farm in Wisconsin as one of eight siblings. He studied at the University of Wisconsin , where he received his doctorate in 1935. He then became a professor there and stayed at the university until his retirement in 1972. He spent only a few months in the summer of 1935 in the Terrestrial Magnetism Department of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC and the war years 1940 to 1945 at the Radiation Laboratory of Massachusetts Institute of Technology outside the University of Wisconsin.

Herb devoted himself to improving the Van de Graaff generator since 1935 , for example improving the insulation with high pressure gases. In 1965 he developed the variant of electrostatic generators he called Pelletron and founded his own company, the National Electrostatics Company, which later had around 140 employees and to which Herb devoted himself full-time after his retirement from the university in 1973, especially in sales.

In 1937 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society . In 1968 he received the Tom W. Bonner Prize for Nuclear Physics . He received honorary doctorates in Basel, Lund, the University of Wisconsin and in Sao Paulo. He had been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1955 .

He had been married to Anne Williamson, the daughter of a physics professor, since 1945 and had five children with her.

literature

• Andrew Sessler, Edmund Wilson: Engines of Discovery . World Scientific, 2007

Web links

• Member Directory: RG Herb. National Academy of Sciences, accessed December 5, 2015 (Biographical Memoir by Henry H. Barschall).