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Daughter Mary graduated from Wooster magna cum laude. The best the boys could do was cum laude. She is the wife of the administrative head of Allahabad University's Ewing Christian College (1,500 students) in India.
Compton Effect. In his teens Arthur built a glider that actually flew, published articles on aeronautics, made an astronomical clock for a telescope, took pictures of Halley's comet. He got his Ph.D. at Princeton with a dazzling record. After two years of industrial research on lamps for Westinghouse, he said to his wife, "Betty, I'm going back to university work." This was something of a gamble, but he landed a research fellowship at Cambridge under Lord Rutherford. He was appointed head of the physics department at Washington University (St. Louis), went from there to Chicago at the invitation of the late, great Albert Abraham Michelson.
His measurements of x-ray wave lengths convinced Compton that such rays, although a form of light, could act like bullets as well as waves. If on colliding with gas atoms they lost part of their energy as bullets, they should recoil as waves weaker in intensity and hence longer in wave length. In addition they should kick electrons out of the gas. With apparatus so sensitive that it measured one ten-millionth of the energy of a mosquito climbing an inch of screen, he showed that this was true. This "Compton effect" went far to explain photo-electricity and to make the old idea of a light-conducting ether, already in disrepute, even more unnecessary since light as bullets could travel indefinitely through empty space. The "Compton effect" won him a Nobel prize for physics in 1927.
With his wife and two sons. Dr. Compton lives in Chicago in a big brick house filled with souvenirs of their world tour. He does not know the taste of hard liquor, almost never smokes, always offers a cigaret to women visitors. He plays such a bang-up game of tennis that he sometimes has a hard time finding worthy opponents. Several times a month he puts in an evening of mandolin-playing with three friends. When his graduate students have finished an examination, he likes to dine them and take them to the theatre.
God & His Children. He has one class a day, at 8 a. m., after which he works in his office, which has a black steel desk, cream walls, tan curtains, grey rug, a cosmic-ray counter clicking away in a corner; or in the laboratories just outside where he has $50,000 worth of equipment for his own researches. He does much of his own experimental work, and his assistants admire his manual skill. He is reputed the best scientific glassblower in the Midwest.
A deacon in the Baptist Church, Dr. Compton attends nearly every Sunday, is actively interested in missions, Y. M. C. A. and settlement work. Like Britain's Eddington, he sees in Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (which avers that the behavior of electrons is unpredictable) evidence that man is not an automaton in a mechanistic universe, but a free agent responsible to his Creator. "Science can have no quarrel," says Arthur Compton. ''with a religion which postulates a God to whom men are as His children."