Harvey C. Rentschler

Harvey C. Rentschler, director of research for the Westinghouse Electric Company’s lamp division in Bloomfield until his retirement in 1947, died on March 23, at the age of sixty‐eight. In 1922, Dr. Rentschler and John W. Marden refined samples of uranium metal from uranium salts in order to determine the suitability of that metal as a substitute for tungsten lamp filaments. Although the melting point of uranium proved to be far too low for use in filaments, the knowledge of uranium metallurgy thus gained made the Westinghouse lamp laboratory for a number of years the sole producer of the pure uranium used in early experimental work. In 1942 the laboratory was able to increase its uranium production from a few ounces to over five hundred pounds a day and supplied more than three tons of uranium for the first Chicago pile. Dr. Rentschler was a professor of physics for nine years at the University of Missouri before joining the Westinghouse research laboratories in 1917. He was a fellow of the American Physical Society and of the Optical Society of America.

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