1. William Weber Coblentz was an American physicist notable for his contributions to infrared radiometry and spectroscopy.
22 Facts About William Coblentz
1. 2.
William Coblentz was born in North Lima, Ohio to parents of German and Swiss descent.
3.
William Coblentz's mother died when Coblentz was just under three, leaving him temporarily with a family of just his younger brother and their father.
4.
However, the father remarried about 2 years later, and Coblentz appears to have admired his second mother.
5.
The family's extremely modest circumstances led to a somewhat-delayed education for William Coblentz, who did not finish high school until 1896, when he was 22 years old.
6.
William Coblentz entered the Case School of Applied Science, now Case Western Reserve University in the fall of 1896, and received his Bachelor of Science degree in physics in June, 1900.
7.
William Coblentz went on to earn MS and PhD degrees from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, staying two years beyond his doctoral time by working as a Research Fellow with support from the Carnegie Institution.
8.
William Coblentz received a total of ten patents during his lifetime, the first being US Patent 1,077,219 for a solar cell invention to convert sunlight to electricity.
9.
For example, William Coblentz was among the first, if not the very first, to verify Planck's Law.
10.
When William Coblentz entered Cornell University, infrared spectroscopy was in what today would be considered an extremely primitive state.
11.
William Coblentz made observations of solar eclipses, and published papers describing his work.
12.
William Coblentz appears to have brought the same energy to the latter field as he did to his other areas of interest.
13.
William Coblentz was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1930.
14.
In 1945, shortly after retiring, William Coblentz received the Frederic Ives Medal from the Optical Society of America.
15.
The William Coblentz Society, dedicated to the understanding and application of vibrational spectroscopy, is named in his honor, as is the William Coblentz Medal.
16.
William Coblentz was given membership card number 1 from the Society.
17.
William Coblentz died just before his 1905 work on infrared spectroscopy was reprinted, nearly 60 years after its first publication.
18.
William Coblentz wed Catherine Emma Cate of Vermont on June 10,1924, and it is said that they spent their honeymoon in Flagstaff, Arizona while Coblentz was at the Lowell Observatory measuring planetary temperatures.
19.
Catherine Cate William Coblentz achieved success as a writer of children's book, worked for a time at the National Bureau of Standards, and was instrumental in raising money to build the Cleveland Park Neighborhood Library in Washington, DC.
20.
William Coblentz reportedly was plagued by periods of poor health, but he lived nearly 90 years.
21.
William Coblentz is buried in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, DC alongside his wife and an infant daughter.
22.
Copies of most of William Coblentz's books are listed as being in the libraries of the University of Maryland and the American Institute of Physics, both in College Park, Maryland, not far from where William Coblentz lived, worked, and died.