Karl Taylor Compton
| Karl Taylor Compton | |
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Karl Taylor Compton, 1940.
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| President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology | |
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In office 1930–1948 |
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| Preceded by | Samuel Wesley Stratton |
| Succeeded by | James Rhyne Killian |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
September 14, 1887 Wooster, Ohio, United States |
| Died | June 22, 1954 (aged 66) New York City, New York, United States |
| Relatives |
Arthur Compton (brother) Wilson Martindale Compton (brother) |
| Alma mater | The College of Wooster |
Karl Taylor Compton (September 14, 1887 – June 22, 1954) was a prominent American physicist and president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1930 to 1948.
Karl Taylor Compton was born in Wooster, Ohio, the eldest of three brothers (including Arthur Compton and Wilson Martindale Compton) and one sister, Mary. His father, Elias Compton, was from an old American Presbyterian family, and his mother, Otelia Augspurger Compton, was from an Alsatian and Hessian Mennonite family that had recently immigrated to the United States. He came from a remarkably accomplished family in which his brother Arthur became a prominent physicist and sister Mary a missionary.
Beginning in 1897, Compton's summers were spent camping at Otsego Lake, Michigan while attending Wooster public schools in fall, winter and summer. He took hard labor jobs starting at age eleven to help pay for college, working carrying hods for construction projects, as a farm hand, mule skinner, a book canvasser, in tile and brick factories and surveyed the first mile of paved road in Ohio.
In 1902, Compton skipped a grade and went into Wooster University's preparatory department for the last two years of high school. In 1908, he graduated from Wooster cum laude with a bachelor of philosophy degree, then in 1909 his master's thesis A study of the Wehnelt electrolytic interrupter was published in Physical Review. During 1909–1910 he was an instructor in Wooster's chemistry department before entering a graduate program at Princeton University. There he received the Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship, and worked with Owen Willans Richardson and jointly published several papers on electrons released by ultraviolet light, electron theory and on the photoelectric effect. Richardson went on to receive the Nobel Prize in some of the areas where Compton contributed. In 1912, Compton received his Ph.D. from Princeton summa cum laude.
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