Physics in the 1920s
1921
Head Albert Carman notes in his annual report that the year's national production of physics PhDs was 21.
Professor Joseph Tykociner (Electrical Engineering) collaborates with Jakob Kunz to use Kunz's photoelectric cell to photograph sound and reproduce it electronically, enabling the first sound-on-film motion picture recordings.
Tykociner has occasionally been called "the man that history forgot"; Jakob Kunz was the physicist that everybody forgot, including Tykociner's fans.
1922
E. Frances Seiler,
a student of Jakob Kunz's, becomes the first woman to earn a Ph.D in physics at the University of Illinois. Her thesis, #20 in the department, was on
the color-sensitiveness of photoelectric cells. She was later a professor of mathematics at the University of Denver.
1923
The first engineering physics bachelor's degree is awarded to Wallace Waterfall, who will serve as the secretary of the American Institute of Physics from 1945 until his death in 1974. Head Albert Carman secures approval, over considerable College and University opposition, to appoint graduate teaching assistants on a half-time basis to give them more time for research. The tradition of Thursday Physics colloquia begins.
1926
Professor Charles T. Knipp invents a simplified apparatus that makes alpha-ray tracks visible in water vapor. Although C.T.R. Wilson, working at Cambridge, England, was the first to show the alpha ray by means of a highly complicated, expensive machine, Knipp's device not only shows the tracks more distinctly but also can be constructed for one-tenth the cost of Wilson's. (Wilson would win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1927 for his invention; Knipp wouldn't.)
1929
F. Wheeler Loomis is appointed head of the Department of Physics; he will turn it from a backwater, pre-quantum mechanics faculty to the world-class center of physics research and teaching that Albert Carman dreamed of. Initially dismayed by the quality of the faculty and suffering from an Easterner's disdain of the rural Midwest, Loomis nevertheless sees the potential of Illinois. According to Loomis, "I came here knowing ... that the department was obsolete and the only way to get it over being obsolete was to get some new people." Loomis is also impressed by the national reputations of the chemistry and mathematics departments and is attracted by the personal qualities and evident support of the Dean of Engineering, Milo S. Ketchum. A new era of important research in atomic and molecular spectroscopy and in nuclear physics is launched.
