Gordon Ferrie Hull

Dartmouth's Retiring Ace Physicist is Devoted to Science, Children, Outdoor Life and Controversy

ONE NIGHT LAST FALL a group of colleagues going to a forum on the repeal of the arms embargo met Gordon Ferrie Hull.

"Coming to the peace meeting, Mr. Hull?" one of them asked. Professor Hull cocked his head to one side in a characteristic gesture and drawled in the voice with the slight Canadian burr so well known to generations of Dartmouth men:

"We-11, I don't know—l guess not, if I did I might get into a fight." With a laugh and an observation that peace meetings generally ended in a fight, the others went on their way. And one of them said:

"It's a grand thing for an old New England college to have such an individualist as Gordon Ferrie Hull kicking around. We'll certainly miss him in faculty meetings."

Most men are bundles of contradictions but Dartmouth College has no more salty example of the human paradox than Professor Hull. A delightful host, an entertaining companion, a teacher considerate of both students and associates, there is no one in Hanover more capable of stirring up a hornet's nest of controversy than he. Perhaps he would say it is the Irish in him. With the tolerance and skepticism of the scientist he can be, nevertheless, passionately opinionated and dogmatic. He is a meticulous research worker with a national reputation and yet he is known at Dartmouth primarily as a great teacher. He is devoted to his subject; he will speak to you with glowing enthusiasm of the profound meaning which the world of modern physics holds for the future of mankind; yet he is just as keenly interested in matters far afield from physics: in children, in literature, in his garden, in watching a flicker in a tree. He is, in fact, a shining refutation of the notion that the "scientist" is cool, altogether rational, impersonal—and perhaps a little arid. Master of a subject (though he would modestly deny this claim) which demands exactitude in terms of million ths of dimensions, he is a living illustration of Heisenberg's Principle of Indeterminacy: you think you've got your finger on him but his velocity has whisked him away. Again, for want of a better explanation, it's probably the Irish in him. And for a final paradox, he is a Yankee individualist who was born and raised in Canada.

his mother was of the Moore family, quite possibly a connection of the Irish poet. His father came to Canada and settled on a farm south of Hamilton, Ontario, where Gordon Ferrie Hull was born. The elder Hull not only farmed; he taught school, kept store, went into politics, wished he had been a lawyer because he had a passion for public speaking, could recite poetry by the yard. He was also keenly interested in mathematics and had a collection of rare mathematical treatises which Professor Hull wishes he now owned. Of his early days Mr. Hull remembers particularly the feat of harvesting a hundred acres of grain in one season with one of the early self-binders. He graduated from the University of Toronto in the class of 1892. He taught English and mathematics at Hamilton Collegiate Institute; he wears proudly a gold watch chain and charm presented to him by the first of a long line of classes. He did research work at his alma mater in his subject—in those days called "natural philosophy"; then he went to Chicago. His father was a north of Ireland man;

It was at Chicago that Gordon Ferrie Hull's long and distinguished career as a research scientist really got under way. He went there as an assistant to Michelson, later to achieve world-wide fame with the Michelson-Morley experiments which played so important a part in the development of Einstein's theory of relativity. Another associate was the equally famous Millikan, with whom he has kept up a friendship for over fifty years (they roomed together at Washington during the war).

Before he left Toronto Hertz had announced his epoch-making discoveries of the electric waves and Mr. Hull decided to conduct experiments with these strange new genie destined in a generation to bring to hundreds of millions of ears jazz, soap-operas, symphonic music and the hysterics of Adolph Hitler. That was an exciting time. He remembers vividly how, in Christmas week 1895 the news of Roentgen's discovery of the X-rays was flashed across the Atlantic; and how, on New Year's day in 1896, he gave a lecture on X-rays in Chicago, using a vacuum tube pumped out by the old-fashioned mercury pump for which the mercury had to be laboriously lifted up to the table by hand. At Chicago he continued the experiments in generating waves begun at Toronto upon which he later wrote his doctoral thesis. He remembers trundling a generator around a city block on a wheelbarrow and signalling back to the detector through the stone walls of the laboratory.

To HANOVER IN 1899

After further study at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, research in Berlin, and a year of teaching at Colby in Maine, Mr. Hull came to Dartmouth in 1899- Then in the years 1901-1903, with his colleague Dr. Ernest Fox Nichols, he conducted the experiments on the pressure of light which earned him his reputation as a research scientist of distinction.

Nearly forty years before, Clerk Maxwell had asserted, in promulgating his electro-magnetic theory of light, that light had velocity and exerted pressure—though the pressure of a beam of sunlight would be too minute to be detected. Hull and Dr. Nichols had met at the Yerkes Observatory and discussed Maxwell's theory, Nichols having come at the problem from his work with heat waves at the other side of the spectrum. When Hull came to Dartmouth a year or so later, largely through the efforts of Dr. Nichols and Edwin Frost, the famous Dartmouth astronomer who was for years at the head of Yerkes, they tackled the demonstration of the theory in earnest.

The difficulty was that a beam of light generates heat waves and that the gas action of the particles creates a much greater pressure than the light so that it was necessary to eliminate the gas action as a factor. The apparatus consisted of two light vanes of thin glass silvered on one face delicately suspended in a bell jar. In order that the gas action might be reduced to a minimum so that the delicate computations could be made it was necessary to achieve a high vacuum in the bell jar.

Professor Hull can preach you an eloquent sermon on the "value of a vacuum." The two men spent hours and hours in pumping out the air with the old-fashioned mercury air pumps: it took them two hours to get a high vacuum such as can now be attained by the pressure of a button. It is now possible to produce a vacuum a thousand times more perfect than the one the experimenters attained in the Wilder Hall laboratory in a tenth of the time. It has to be possible, Hull says, with the yearly business in electric light bulbs and vacuum tubes running into the hundreds of millions of dollars! The experiments continued over a period of two or three years; when, in 1903 Dr. Nichols left, Hull continued them for two or three years more, checking and re-checking the results. But Maxwell's theory was conclusively proved and has become the basis of much of modern physics—notably the quantum theory.

Incidentally, there was much local excitement about the comet's tails the two men had made out of puff-ball spores. Astronomers had long noticed that the tail of a comet always turned away from the sun. Could this phenomenon be due to the pressure of light? They pillaged old Butterfield Hall for a huge puff-ball, cut it up, got out the spores which they cooked to get rid of the oil and transformed them into hollow carbon spheres which they put into an hour glass to see if they would be deflected by a beam of light. They were never able to prove that the deflection was not due to an electrical effect rather than to the pressure of light; but one gathers that they had a lot of fun.

In its second year of publication Life published a picture of Professor Hull looking at a celluloid model of "the glass giant of Palomar" and described him as ranking high among the two thousand natural scientists assembled in Atlantic City for the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The reputation was earned by the experiments with light but anyone who knows Professor Hull would know that he would scarcely be content to rest upon those laurels. At seventy his mind is as restless and eager as it was forty years ago.

During the World War (Number 1!) he was appointed a major in the Bureau of Ordnance of the War Department. There he worked on ballistics and the physics of artillery. Let his colleague, Dr. Lyman J. Briggs, Director of the National Bureau of Standards, tell the story:

"This was a happy assignment," says Dr. Briggs, "because his thorough knowledge of physics and his keen powers of analysis soon led to requests for his help and advice on many technical problems. I was associated with him in one phase of this work, namely, the effect of the external shape or form of a projectile on the resistance it encountered on passing through the air at high speed. It soon developed that this question could not be answered by any mathematical computation and that we must resort to experimental measurements.

"Inquiry disclosed that the General Electric Company was at that time manufacturing some enormous centrifugal air compressors for use in connection with a large blast furnace installation in India. These compressors were driven by turbines of 5000 H.P. capacity and were capable of delivering a continuous stream of air one foot in diameter at velocities as great as the speed of sound. Authority was secured from the War Department to use these compressors before they were shipped abroad and Prof. Hull and I designed balances by means of which projectiles of different shapes could be pointed nose-on into this air stream and the force of the stream on the projectile measured.

"One of the first difficulties that we had to contend with was the terrific noise that resulted when the projectile was swung into the air stream. It was literally the same as if a continuous stream of projectiles were passing by within a foot or two of one's head at a speed of 1000 feet per second. We tried aviators' helmets and various kinds of plugs in our ears without relief, but necessity in this case was truly the mother of invention and finally we hit upon pledgets of cotton loaded with vaseline. This did the trick and we were able to work in comparative comfort although we were always partially deaf for several hours afterwards. Dry cotton alone gave practically no protection. The men in the shop always knew when Dr. Hull had been working on the 'jet' as we called it because of the blobs of vaseline on his ears.

"This work showed how markedly the air resistance of a projectile depended upon its form and how much better some shapes were than others. In particular the air resistance was greatly decreased by 'boat-tailing' or rounding off the rear end of the projectile slightly instead of leaving a square edge. This was stream-lining in a very real sense but it could not be carried too far because otherwise the projectile would become unstable in its flight and tend to go sidewise."

Another investigation which Professor Hull carried out in cooperation with Dr. Dryden of the Bureau of Standards, using the G. E. air compressor, was concerned with the measurement of the aerodynamical characteristics of air foils at high speeds. "This work," says Dr. Briggs "was of direct value in designing aircraft propellers, the tips of which move at speeds approaching that of sound."

Nineteen hundred and forty—and World War II finds Professor Hull speculating on the possibility of magnetic mines and on the two current problems of physics: the mesotron or heavy electron ("It's a mess!" he says, shaking his head) and the fission of uranium which, we were told just the other day, leads us to the brink of a revolutionary source of energy. "An expanding universe! Expanding physics!" His eyes light up youthfully with the excitement of what is just around the corner.

It is this youthful zest, his colleagues say, which keeps the Physics Department at Dartmouth on its toes. The Department has a weekly seminar—it began with tea in his office forty years ago and has continued throughout his entire teaching career—in which they give reports of meetings and of the latest developments on the physics front, read papers, review books. One can readily see how stimulating must be the effect upon their teaching. He has always taken a keen interest in the welfare and work of his younger associates. And they reciprocate the interest. Letters come from former colleagues—from Hawaii, from Japan. He follows closely Dr. Living-ston's work with Lawrence on the cyclotron, his son's work in the Bell Laboratories. As one listens to him one is aware that the world of physics is very much alive!

So is Professor Hull very much alive. The Hanover community is only vaguely aware of what is going 011 in the Wilder laboratories and in the exploding atom. But it knows very well Professor Hull as an explosive human force. The older men will tell you about the fast game of tennis he used to play and about how, with Fred Harris '11, he fathered the Outing Club, building with Harris the first ski jump on what is now Oak Hill, laying out himself the snowshoe course for the first meet, championing the "hicks" of the early Outing Club days against the scorn and ridicule of most of the undergraduates. Years ago there was a battle royal in the Council of Student Organizations when proponents of the Junior Prom fought against allowing the Outing Club representation on the Council. Well, times have changed! There was a faction which conceived of the Outing Club as a purely local organization, emphasizing winter sports and meets. But Professor Hull, in his first years at Dartmouth, discovered the state outside of Hanover. With Dr. Nichols, in 1903, he took a hiking trip through Lost River (long before the days of ladders and student guides) and the Flume and over the Presidential Range. He went on every Outing Club trip during the three years he was its adviser, made the winter trip up Mt. Washington. He was interested in the mountains, the cabins and the trails, rather than in Carnival. The later history of the Outing Club, in spite of the elevation of Carnival to the movies, seems to have vindicated his interest.

After a dinner at Mrs. Hull's sumptuous board he will read Stephen Leacock with relish. An old friend of the English Department recalls how Mr. Hull introduced him to Synge; and he commented on a passage on an English examination: "Who wrote that muddled piece of prose? It sounds like Mayor Curley." "That, my dear Hull, was from Milton's Areopagitica, one of the classics of English literature." "That's the trouble with it; it sounds like it." Another humanist was expatiating at dinner upon music. "Middle C has around 480 vibrations per second," he said, cavalierly doubling the number. "Isn't that right, Hull?" "Well," drawled Professor Hull with the courteous tolerance for which he is not widely famous, "approximately!"

Not widely famous—for there is many a member of both faculty and administration who has been irritated by Professor Hull's harangues in faculty meetings. He has sat of tenest in the front ranks of the opposition, being congenitally against the government, wherever at the moment the government appears to have taken its stand. Things may be going smoothly when from the front bench slowly rises the man with the white hair, the bushy eyebrows, the bird-like toss of head, the keen eyes twinkling from behind the glasses. There follows the ambulatory speech, registering objection with sarcasm and devious wit, often barbed so that one forgets the twinkle behind the glasses. One disagrees with him perhaps as often as one agrees—but faculty meetings are distinctly livelier for his presence. He serves, like Socrates in Athens, as a gad-fly to the solemn body; he belongs with the salient characters—like C. D. Adams, George D. Lord, Prescott Orde Skinner—who seem, or perhaps it is only one's advancing age, to be growing unfortunately scarcer on the Dartmouth campus.

Then there are the letters to the paperson the repeal of prohibition, on politics, now on the war. There was a famous debate with Corey Ford on prohibition. "Dentist A testified at a hearing in Washington that beer is good for expectant mothers and Dean Mendel of Yale claimed that, so I infer, if Yale students were allowed to drink good wholesome beer the expectant mothers in New Haven would bring forth babies fully equipped with

teeth." Nor are his animadversions limited to Yale students. In a recent letter in TheDartmouth he remarked acidly that action (in regard to America's part in World War II) would not be "deterred by the loud yapping of a few screw-ball thumb suckers." Unlike, alas, the majority of his profession Gordon Ferrie Hull is not afraid "to stick his neck out."

The children of Hanover see quite another side of him. Many a Hanover school-boy has had his dawning interest in physics stimulated in Professor Hull's laboratory. Whether they are seven or seventeen they are welcome there, to stand in awe while he demonstrates a piece of apparatus, to listen to his simple explanations and to ask questions. "Magnetism," said a seven-year-old to him the other day, "Oh, I know what that is, it's red-hot electricity." There is a group of thirteen-year-olds who are regular visitors. They have a special knock for Professor Hull's door. "Come in quickly!" he calls out. The door opens quietly and they enter. The spokesman for the group advances: "If you're not busy we thought we'd come in and play with you a while."

That it is as much play for him as for the boys is probably one of the reasons why, at seventy, he is one of Dartmouth's liveliest teachers. For it is not as the research scientist, the man of wide interests, the academic gad-fly that Gordon Ferrie Hull will be best remembered by a host of Dartmouth men. He will be remembered as the lecturer in Physics 3-4, as the man who made the difficult but fundamental science of our time exciting and alive. For years to come they will recall his feat of memorizing in a week or so the names of the one hundred and seventy or so men ranged in the amphitheatre before him in old Wilder 104. ("It isn't so remarkable," he says with a deprecatory toss of his head. "I just call the roll the first few days and fix each man in my mind where he sits.") They will remember his child-like delight in gadgets: the window curtains that come down at the press of a button; the photoelectric cell rigged up to ring a bell and startle a late-comer out of his wits. ("It makes the boys ask questions," he says; and one is sure it does.) They will remember the dramatic experiments on the long table in the pit of the amphitheatre, his ingenious method of magnifying delicate apparatus with lenses and throwing experiments upon the screen. They will remember his aesthetic pleasure in beautiful colors obtained with polaroid; his absorption with the subject he is pursuing so that he may fill the blackboard with a long and difficult formula then start and wipe it off with the remark: "Oh, I forgot, you don't know about that!" and the sigh of relief when they realize they are not expected to. Above all, even the C men will remember that for three hours a week for one year out of a lifetime they have had a glimpse into the mysterious forces of an exciting universe.

"What will I do when I retire? Oh, I shall revise my text-book in elementary physics, go to meetings, participate in the weekly seminar of the Department." (And he will, one is sure, work in his garden, follow the development in his field in the journals, button-hole a colleague on the street for an argument, write letters: to the papers.) He shakes his head a little ruefully. "But I don't know what I shall do without my lectures—I shall miss them most of all."

They have got two men to take his place and Physics 3-4 will, naturally, go on for future generations of Dartmouth men. And the shadow of a great lecturer and teacher will linger on in Wilder 104: for Gordon Ferrie Hull is one of those men who make an institution something infinitely more than bricks and mortar and a subject something more than lifeless formulae and abstract laws.

A RECENT PORTRAIT Pastel of Professor Hull by Sidsell Washbum, wife of Harold E. Washburn 10,Professor of Romance Languages.

PROFESSOR STEARNS MORSE

GORDON FERRIE HULL RETIRES THIS MONTH AFTER 41 YEARS OF TEACHING