Mark Aiken Heald

Mark Aiken Heald grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, son of Mark Mortimer Heald and June Kilts Heald. At age 8 with his parents, the family were eyewitnesses of the fiery end of the Hindenburg zeppelin. In the early 1930s the family acquired a one-acre island in one of the Rideau Lakes of southern Ontario, where they built a rustic summer camp—dearly beloved by the ensuing family for many years.

Mark graduated from Princeton High School in 1946. Mark’s high-school years coincided with World War II. He was very active with the local Boy Scout troop and their wartime projects. Beginning in fifth grade he took instruction on the clarinet. He taught himself the alto saxophone in order to play in classmates’ Glenn Miller–style dance band.

He graduated from Oberlin College, Ohio, as a physics major in 1950. He continued in the graduate school at Yale University, receiving his PhD in 1954.

In Oberlin he met Jane Dewey, who had grown up in Montana. Mark was two years ahead of Jane, so there was an active exchange of letters for two years between New Haven and Oberlin. They were married on Jane’s graduation day in 1952.

Upon completion of the PhD, Mark worked in a research program at Princeton University on controlled nuclear fusion, attempting to develop a method to extract useful civilian energy in a controlled way from the fusion of hydrogenic nuclei. Two children, Kate and John, joined the family during this time. Mark was a technological delegate to the 1958 Atoms for Peace conference and exhibition in Geneva, Switzerland.

In 1959 Mark accepted a teaching position at Swarthmore College. The college provided research sabbaticals. The first of these, 1964–65, was a wunderyear: Mark had a nine-month appointment at a British atomic energy lab. The family lived in a charming rural village south of Oxford. The two extended summers allowed the family to tour the continent and Great Britain in a British camping van. A third child, Charles, joined the family shortly after the return home. Subsequent sabbaticals were twice back at the Princeton lab and once at MIT.

Mark coauthored three books: Plasma Diagnostics with Microwaves (with C. B. Wharton, 1965), Physics of Waves (with W. C. Elmore, 1969), and Classical Electromagnetic Radiation (with J. B. Marion, 1990).

Mark retired from Swarthmore in 1992. In 1998 Mark and Jane moved into the Uplands Retirement Village in rural Pleasant Hill, Tennessee, where they found warm friendships and many small-world connections with the other residents. At Uplands he has worked with the P. H. Child Enrichment Center, the town recycling program, and the community musical ensemble.

He is survived by his wife of 68 years, Jane; three children, Kate Nicholes of Lennep, Montana, John Heald of Queens, New York, and Charles Heald of Rochester, Washington; and three granddaughters.