Wooster native won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1927
Arthur Compton speaks at The College of Wooster in 1951. Compton, who won the Nobel Prize in 1927, was born in Wooster and got his undergraduate degree, a Bachelor of Science, at the college.
On The College of Wooster’s Wikipedia page, its list of notable people begins with Arthur Holly Compton. It’s merely coincidence that Compton falls first alphabetically. It’s hard to imagine him not topping the chart, regardless of how people are ranked.
Having a Nobel Prize will do that. So will taking part in the Manhattan Project.
The former came about in 1927 when Compton earned the Nobel Prize for Physics, one of two honorees that year, along with Charles Thomson Reese Wilson of the United Kingdom. Compton was only the third American winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Compton won for his discovery of the effect named after himself. The Compton Effect, also known as Compton Scattering, was first discovered in 1923 and explained the interaction between charged particles and high-frequency protons.
Compton’s research led to advances in radiology, which allowed the medical field to move forward in ways not previously available. His research paved the way to much of radiobiology, a field that includes MRIs, ultrasound and X-rays.
The Compton Effect ultimately was proved by Harvard scientist William Duane, who had set out to show Compton’s research was wrong. After a couple years of trying, Duane had to concede that Compton was in fact correct, and the Nobel followed.
For his efforts, Compton received a share of a prize of approximately $15,500, roughly $212,000 in today’s dollars. Modern-day winners take home more than $1 million.
That may have only been Compton’s second-most valuable contribution, depending on the outlook. In the early-1940s, he was head of the Metallurgical Laboratory, which produced nuclear reactors that converted uranium into plutonium and found ways to separate plutonium from uranium, all of which helped in the design of the first atomic bombs.
Under Compton’s watch, the world’s first nuclear reactor, known as Chicago Pile-1, emerged from an experiment conducted by Italian scientist Enrico Fermi, known in some parts as the “Father of the Nuclear Age.”
All of this started in 1941, before the United States had even entered World War II. Vannevar Bush, then head honcho at the National Defense Research Committee, formed a special committee to report on the NDRC’s uranium program. Compton was head of that committee.
By May 1941, still more than six months from Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Compton submitted a report that predicted development of radiological weapons and other advances and applications such as nuclear propulsion for ships and ultimately nuclear weapons.
Compton later was part of the Scientific Panel of the Interim Committee, which recommended using the atomic bomb against Japan. Also on that committee were Robert Oppenheimer and Fermi.
“The secretary of war should be advised that, while recognizing that the final selection of the target was essentially a military decision, the present view of the committee was that the bomb should be used against Japan as soon as possible, that it be used on a war plant surrounded by workers’ homes and that it be used without prior warning,” the committee wrote after a June 1, 1945 meeting.
The bombs were subsequently dropped two months later in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and World War II came to a close.
Much of this was tap-danced around recently in the hit movie “Oppenheimer,”in which Compton is nowhere to be found among many others with whom he was directly involved.
For instance, Bush is portrayed by Matthew Modine, Tom Conti is Albert Einstein and Danny Defarrari plays Fermi, all of whom shared time and space with Compton during the Manhattan Project’s conduction.
Compton was born in Wooster on Sept. 10, 1892, to Elias and Otelia Compton, the latter being whom Compton Hall at The College of Wooster is named after. He was one of three brothers in his family, all of whom earned a PhD.
Compton got his undergraduate degree, a Bachelor of Science, at Wooster. From there he moved to Princeton, where he earned both his master’s degree and doctorate. He went on to be a physics professor at the University of Minnesota before spending time as a research engineer.
He ultimately landed at Washington University in St. Louis, where in 1946 he became chancellor. While there he was criticized for the university being the last one in St. Louis to allow black students, perhaps the only blight on his lifetime record. The school only became fully racially desegregated near the end of his eight years as chancellor.
He married Betty Charity McCloskey in 1916. Betty Compton died in 1980 at the age of 88. The couple had two children: John Joseph and Arthur Alan. Each graduated from The College of Wooster.
In between his Nobel Prize-winning research and his work on the Manhattan Project, Compton did a great deal of research on cosmic rays, which landed him on the cover of Time in 1936. The accompanying article noted that Compton, in addition to his scientific contributions, never drank, rarely smoked but always offered a cigarette to women visitors, and was a lights-out tennis player who often had difficulty finding a suitable playing partner. He played a mean mandolin and would treat his graduate students to dinner and movies when the work was done.
While Compton headed up perhaps more historically significant committees, he also was president of the American Physical Society in 1934, the American Association of Scientific Workers from 1939-40 and the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1942. He collected many honorary degrees and distinctions along the way.
Compton was a professor-at-large at the University of California at Berkeley in 1962, when he died on March 15 of a brain hemorrhage six months shy of his 70th birthday. He is buried in the Wooster Cemetery.