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Merle Tuve

Merle Anthony Tuve
Born June 27, 1901
Canton, South Dakota
Died May 20, 1982 (1982-05-21) (aged 80)
Bethesda, Maryland
Nationality United States
Fields Physics
Institutions Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (1942-1946)
Carnegie Institution for Science (1946-66)
Alma mater University of Minnesota
(BS, 1922)
(MS, 1923)
Johns Hopkins University
(PhD, 1927)
Notable awards Presidential Medal for Merit
(1948)
Barnard Medal for Meritorious Service to Science (1955)
William Bowie Medal (1963)
Howard N. Potts Medal
John Scott Award

Merle Anthony Tuve (June 27, 1901 – May 20, 1982) was an American geophysicist who was the founding director of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. He was a pioneer in the use of pulsed radio waves whose discoveries opened the way to the development of radar and nuclear energy.

Merle Antony Tuve was born in Canton, South Dakota. He and physicist Ernest Lawrence were childhood friends. All four of his grandparents were born in Norway and subsequently immigrated to the United States. His father, Anthony G. Tuve, was president of Augustana College and his mother, Ida Marie Larsen Tuve, taught music there. After Tuve's father died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, the family moved to Minneapolis, where Merle attended the University of Minnesota; he received there a BS degree in 1922 and an MS degree in 1923 both in Physics. Following a year at Princeton where he was an instructor, Tuve subsequently went to work for his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University. He obtained there his PhD degree in Physics in 1927.

In 1925, with physicist Gregory Breit, he used radio waves to measure the height of the ionosphere and probe its interior layers. The observations he made provided the theoretical foundation for the development of radar. He was among the first physicists to use high-voltage accelerators to define the structure of the atom. In 1933 he confirmed the existence of the neutron and was also able to measure the binding forces in atomic nuclei.


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