Edwin C. Kemble

Edwin Crawford Kemble (January 28, 1889 in Delaware, Ohio – March 12, 1984) was an American physicist who made contributions to the theory of quantum mechanics and molecular structure and spectroscopy. During World War II, he was a consultant to the Navy on acoustic detection of submarines and to the Army on Operation Alsos.

Kemble began college in 1906 at Ohio Wesleyan University, but he stayed there only one year. He then transferred to the Case School of Applied Science, where he received his B.S. in physics in 1911. At Case, Kemble was a student of Dayton C. Miller, a nationally recognized scientist working in the field of acoustics. Upon graduation from Case, he spent the following year as a physics instructor at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, a school founded in response to the growing demand for education in technology, as was Case. During that year, Miller obtained a graduate fellowship for Kemble at Harvard; the fellowship was personally financed by Harvard Professor Wallace Sabine, a colleague of Miller’s in acoustics. Kemble entered graduate school in 1913, with Percy Bridgman as his thesis advisor. This was the year Niels Bohr submitted his first paper on the Bohr model of the hydrogen atom. Universities in Europe were in the process of making the transition from the predominance of experimental physics to that of theoretical physics, as was the case in the United States. Bridgman, a well-known experimentalist, did, however, champion Kemble’s interest in pursuing theoretical interests in physics. Kemble was drawn to the new quantum theories in a course on radiation by G. W. Pierce. It was while considering thesis topics that Kemble was drawn to the recently introduced quantum theory of molecular spectra. He received his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard in 1917.

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