Edward Purcell

Born on 30 August 1912 in Taylorville, Illinois, Edward Mills Purcell was a physics Nobel laureate who developed a way to measure radio emissions from hydrogen in space. Purcell started out in electrical engineering, graduating from Purdue University in 1933. After a year abroad as an exchange student at the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe, Germany, he returned to the US to study physics at Harvard University, where he earned his master’s in 1935 and PhD in 1938. He taught at Harvard for three years before taking a leave of absence during World War II to work on military radar technology at MIT’s Radiation Laboratory. There he met I. I. Rabi, the discoverer of nuclear magnetic resonance. After the war, Purcell used his work with radio waves to expand Rabi’s molecular-beam NMR technique for use with liquids and solids to determine the extremely weak magnetism of the atomic nucleus. For that work, Purcell shared the 1952 Nobel Prize in Physics with Felix Bloch of Stanford University. Purcell went on in the 1950s to construct a radio telescope that used NMR to measure radio emissions in space. With it, he was able to detect hydrogen’s signature frequency and thus helped launch the field of radio astronomy. He died in 1997 at age 84. (Photo credit: National Archives and Records Administration, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives)

Date in History: 30 August 1912