Percy Williams Bridgman, 1882-1961

Abstract

On 24 October 1961 a service was held at the Memorial Church in Harvard Yard to honour the memory of one whose entire professional career was spent at the University, who was for nearly half a century a member of the faculty and who, in a wider sphere, achieved distinction as an experimental physicist, a philosopher and a bold and original thinker. The addresses given on this occasion by several of his colleagues and friends depict a man of unusual stature and of many remarkable gifts. Percy Williams Bridgman, the only son of Raymond Landon Bridgman and Ann Maria Williams, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 21 April 1882. His father was a journalist by profession, a social and political writer and a lively and ready debater. The family circle was a united one, providing that stable and secure background against which children find freedom to develop according to inclination and ability. In his schooldays, which were spent at Newton, Percy appears to have been an average boy, somewhat shy, keenly interested in sports and games and a good chess player; but it was also remarked that he had, without any need for close application, little or no difficulty in keeping abreast of his school work. He entered Harvard College in 1900, graduated with an A.B.Summa cum laudein 1904 and obtained his A.M. the following year. He had from the first shown ability as an experimentalist, a real artistry in the handling of machine tools and in glass manipulation and a great capacity for intensive work. His interests lay primarily in the field of physics and after graduation he required little persuasion to stay on at College to undertake research in the Jefferson Physical Laboratory. His imagination had early been aroused by the classical work of the great French physicists Cailletet and Amagat on the properties of fluids at high pressures and he resolved to extend their researches into those higher ranges of pressure at which new phenomena might be expected to occur.