Compton, Arthur H.

Compton, Arthur H. (1892–1962), physicist.Born in Wooster, Ohio, Compton received his B.S. from the College of Wooster and his Ph.D. from Princeton University (1916), after which he taught for a year at the University of Minnesota; worked as a research engineer in the Westinghouse Research Laboratories in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1917–1919); studied on a fellowship at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England (1919–1920); and became professor of physics at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri (1920–1923). In 1916, he married Betty Charity McCloskey; they had two sons.

In 1922, while doing research on X rays, Compton discovered what came to be called the Compton effect, for which in 1927 he shared the Nobel Prize in physics. X rays were long known to behave like ordinary electromagnetic waves under various experimental conditions. Compton now showed that when X rays collide with electrons in a substance like carbon, they behave like particles. This discovery at long last established the validity of Albert Einstein's light‐quantum hypothesis of 1905 and became a milestone in the creation of quantum mechanics.

Compton moved to the University of Chicago in 1923, where in the 1930s he carried out important cosmic‐ray research. During World War II, he directed the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, where Enrico Fermi achieved the first nuclear chain reaction on 2 December 1942. In 1945, he became chancellor of Washington University and taught there until his retirement in 1961. The deeply religious son of a Presbyterian minister, Compton in his public lectures and writings always insisted upon the compatability of science and religious faith.
See also Science: From 1914 to 1945; Science: Since 1945.

Bibliography

Marjorie Johnson, ed., The Cosmos of Arthur Holly Compton, 1967.
Roger H. Stuewer , The Compton Effect: Turning Point in Physics, 1975.

Roger H. Stuewer