Percy Bridgman

It’s the birthday of Percy Bridgman, who was born in 1882 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Bridgman earned a PhD at Harvard University, where he remained for the rest of his professional life. Thanks to his clever mechanical designs, Bridgman was able to exert pressures on samples that exceeded those of previous apparatus by several orders of magnitude. He systematically explored the high-pressure mechanical, thermodynamic and electromagnetic behavior of hundreds of materials. He was awarded the 1946 Nobel physics prize for his pioneering work in high-pressure physics. Last year an international commission approved the name bridgmanite for the Earth’s most abundant mineral, perovksite-structured (Mg,Fe)SiO3, which is found at high pressures throughout the lower mantle.

Date in History: 21 April 1882