21 Facts About Joseph Weber

Joseph Weber gave the earliest public lecture on the principles behind the laser and the maser and developed the first gravitational wave detectors, known as Weber bars.

Joseph Weber was born in Paterson, New Jersey, on 17 May 1919, the last of four children born to Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrant parents.

Joseph Weber had no birth certificate, and his father had taken the last name of "Weber" to match an available passport in order to emigrate to the US.

Joseph Weber attended Paterson public schools, graduating at sixteen from the "Mechanic Arts Course" of Paterson Eastside High School in June 1935.

Joseph Weber began his undergraduate education at Cooper Union, but to save his family the expense of his room and board he won admittance to the United States Naval Academy through a competitive exam.

Joseph Weber served aboard US Navy ships during World War II, rising to the rank of lieutenant commander.

Joseph Weber was the Officer of the Deck on the USS Lexington when the ship received word of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Joseph Weber often regaled his students with the story of how the Lexington glowed incandescent as she slipped beneath the waves.

Joseph Weber resigned from the navy as a lieutenant commander in 1948 to become a professor of engineering.

Joseph Weber completed his PhD, with a thesis entitled Microwave Technique in Chemical Kinetics, from The Catholic University of America in 1951.

Joseph Weber submitted a paper in 1951 for the June 1952 Electron Tube Research Conference held in Ottawa, which was the earliest public lecture on the principles behind the laser and the maser.

Joseph Weber developed the first gravitational wave detectors in the 1960s, and began publishing papers with evidence that he had detected these waves.

Joseph Weber said it seemed the waves were coming from Sagittarius, or 180 degrees away.

Dr Joseph Weber had allowed for noise with random amplitude, but he had not allowed for random phase.

Today we might consider the possibility that Dr Joseph Weber caught some particular event of our galaxy's black hole, which event was not repeated.

Unfortunately no one seems willing to allow for this and Dr Joseph Weber gets no credit for possibly being the first to detect gravitational waves.

Joseph Weber himself continued to maintain his gravitational wave detection equipment until his death.

Joseph Weber patented the idea of using vibrating crystals to generate neutrinos.

Joseph Weber's notebooks contained ideas for laser interferometers; later such a detector was first constructed by his former student Robert Forward at Hughes Research Laboratories.

Joseph Weber had four sons, and six grandchildren.

Joseph Weber died on 30 September 2000 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, during treatment for lymphoma that had been diagnosed about three years earlier.