William Webster Hansen

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William Webster Hansen (born May 27, 1909 in Fresno , California , USA , † May 23, 1949 in Palo Alto , California) was an American physicist.

Life

Hansen grew up in Fresno , where his father had a tool shop. He was gifted at an early age and graduated from high school at the age of 14, but could only study at Stanford University from the age of 16 . At first he wanted to become an engineer, but then switched to physics and became an instructor himself there after only a year. He received his doctorate in 1933 and went to the University of Michigan as a National Research Fellow and then to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Here he worked for Philip Morse and began to deal with electromagnetic fields . In 1934 he became an assistant professor at Stanford. He stayed there for the rest of his career (except for the war years, when he worked on the Klystron and Radar at Sperry Corporation from 1941 ) and died at the age of 40 of a respiratory disease from which he had suffered for a long time.

From 1937 he was instrumental in the development of the klystron , which was based on an idea ( Rumbatron ) by Hansen and another idea by Russell Varian . Hanson and the Varian brothers (Russell and Sigurd Varian ) worked on it at Sperry Corporation in Long Island in the 1940s . During the Second World War, the klystron was widely used in radar systems, even if the magnetron was still preferred to the klystron as the main microwave generator at that time , but after the war the Varian brothers continued the development in their company with Stanford professor Edward Ginzton . Ginzton and Hansen also built the first traveling wave electron accelerator based on these technologies in Stanford .

1946 was Hansen Martin Packard part of the group led by Felix Bloch , the nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR, nuclear magnetic resonance ) discovered how independent and at the same time Edward Mills Purcell , HC Torrey and Robert Pound at Harvard University . Varian convinced Hansen and Bloch to patent their NMR spectrometer and was soon producing NMR devices in addition to his klystrons.

Hansen was a member of the National Academy of Engineering and, since 1949, the National Academy of Sciences . The WW Hansen Laboratory (WW Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory, HEPL) in Stanford, founded in 1947, is named after him.

literature

  • F. Bloch, W. Hansen, ME Packard: Nuclear Induction . In: Phys. Rev. Band 69 , 1946, pp. 127 , doi : 10.1103 / PhysRev.69.127 .
  • Andrew Sessler, Edmund Wilson: Engines of Discovery . World Scientific, 2007, p. 37 .

Web links

  • WW Hansen. In: Physics History Network. American Institute of Physics

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Felix Bloch: William Webster Hansen 1909-1949. A Biographical Memoir . In: National Academy of Sciences (Ed.): Biographical Memoirs . 1952 (English, nasonline.org [PDF; 688 kB ]).
  2. ^ EL Ginzton, WW Hansen, WR Kennedy: A Linear Electron Accelerator . In: Review of Scientific Instruments . tape 19 , 1948, pp. 89-108 , doi : 10.1063 / 1.1741225 .
  3. ↑ On the history of the Varian A 60 ( Memento from March 13, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) (English)
personal data
SURNAME Hansen, William Webster
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH May 27, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Fresno , California , USA
DATE OF DEATH May 23, 1949
Place of death Palo Alto , California