Obituary of John Frederick Paulson

John F. Paulson, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, died in Carlisle, MA, on August 3, 2010, at age 81, after a long fight with Parkinson’s disease. John commented to me that his birth must have been traumatic for his parents, coming on the very day (October 29) of the stock market crash of 1929 that began the Great Depression. John was born and raised in Providence, RI. He graduated from the Moses Brown School in 1947 and attended Rensselear Polytechnic Institute on a full scholarship. He transferred to Haverford College, from which he graduated in 1951 with an A.B. in Mathematics. He went to the University of Rochester for graduate work in Physical Chemistry, finishing his PhD in 1958. He was a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin before joining the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratory in 1959. He spent his entire career with this laboratory, through several name changes (now the Space Vehicles Directorate of the Air Force Research Laboratory). He was the Group Leader of the Ion Chemistry Lab, then Chief of the Ionospheric Interactions Branch. In 1986 he received the highest award the Air Force gives for scientific or engineering advances, the Harold Brown Award. He retired in 1994 because of the onset of Parkinson’s. Aside from his APS Fellowship, he was a member of the American Chemical Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Society for Mass Spectrometry, and Sigma Xi.

John Paulson entered the ion-molecule reaction field in the early days of that field. The idea of positive ion reactions were known, starting with J. J. Thomson, but the ubiquity and complexity were totally unappreciated. John had an early paper in Nature, 204, p. 377, 1964 on his observation of the cluster ion (CO2)2+. Just a few years later, such cluster ions were recognized as commonplace, but not in the early 1960s. John told me that when he first saw the 88-amu signal on his mass spectrometer, his reaction was, “My God! What is that?!” The first negative ion reaction was not reported until 1957. The first sentence of an article John wrote in Advances in Chemistry, 58, p. 28, 1966 goes, "… little is known of the reactions of even the simplest negative ions.” John carried out ion beam collisions with molecular targets, observing the thresholds for reaction. One result of his that still intrigues me is the collision between H2O.OH- with H2 in which the product ion H3O- was seen in a very narrow energy range (smaller than the beam energy width, after accounting for the thermal motion of the target gas). The resonant nature of this reaction is still unexplained. This was the first observation of the H3O- ion, which has seen further illumination in this lab and others, but that’s another story.

John was pretty much alone in his lab in those days. He had help from his technician, Fred Dale, and the occasional visitor. Important changes came to John’s lab beginning around 1980, when John had Fred construct a selected ion flow tube (SIFT) apparatus (more on this, below) for the study of ion-molecule reactions under thermal conditions, 100-600 K. After 1983, the lab was no longer a one-scientist operation, as Albert Viggiano joined the group. Viggiano was experienced with a SIFT apparatus and the atmospheric ion problems vital to the Air Force. John gradually moved more into management, but kept his hand in the research work as the group grew with continual visitors supported by faculty or NRC programs, all wanting time on the SIFT apparatus for problems that interested them. Scientists Robert Morris, Susan Arnold, and Skip Williams joined the group as civil servants. A final phase of John’s tenure was his design of a high-temperature flowing afterglow apparatus, motivated by the need for data relevant to Air Force plasmas, many of which are at elevated temperature.

While I’ve focused on John’s science, I should say that we all liked his wife, Marjorie, and that John was proud of his children, David (who, I learned recently, built an interesting house in Vermont with his own hands) and Suzanne (now a professor at UCLA), and his two grandchildren, Micaela and Riley. And one cannot think of John without speaking of his sailboat, a 52-footer that he kept in Maine. I think that John liked nothing better than to be out on this boat with family members. He and Marjorie rented sailboats for vacations in the Caribbean.