Arthur Compton

Arthur Holly Compton was born September 10, 1892, and by 1919 had won a National Research Council Fellowship to study gamma rays at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory. That work led to the discovery of the Compton effect, demonstrating the particle nature of electromagnetic radiation at a moment when the physics community resisted the idea. He went on to use X-rays to explain ferromagnetism as electron spin alignment and studied cosmic rays, finding them primarily positively charged. During World War II, Compton became a central architect of the Manhattan Project: his reports helped launch it, and as head of the Metallurgical Laboratory he oversaw Enrico Fermi's Chicago Pile-1, the first reactor to go critical, on December 2, 1942, along with plutonium production sites at Oak Ridge and Hanford. After the war he became Chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis, where he desegregated the undergraduate divisions and appointed the university's first female full professor before his death on March 15, 1962.