Arthur Gordon Webster, Founder of the APS

JUN 01, 1987

He was a man of many talents and considerable renown in his day who helped establish physics education in America, but his life ended in a tragic suicide.

DOI: 10.1063/1.881077

Melba Phillips

Fewer than one in a hundred present members of The American Physical Society could name its founder. Carl Barus, head of physics at Brown University for many years and a member of the committee Arthur Gordon Webster organized in 1899 to discuss the possibility of forming a physical society, wrote many years after that meeting, “The foresight and chief credit…must be assigned to the tireless activity of Prof. Webster and it is to be hoped that the Physical Society may some day commemorate the event in his honor.” According to Ernest Merritt, who was the first secretary of the society and later became its president, “All of us who remember those days are agreed that Webster thoroughly deserved the title that was often given him—‘father of The American Physical Society.’”

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Melba Phillips, University of Chicago.