Albert A. Michelson

Albert A. Michelson died on May 9, 1931 in Pasadena, California.

Many universities and the US Naval academy have named halls and museums after him.

A crater on the Moon is named after him.

Albert A. Michelson was born on December 19, 1852 in Strzelno in the province of Posen, Prussia, currently located in Poland.

When he was only two, his Jewish parents immigrated to the United States in 1855.

He grew up in the mining towns of California and his family finally settled in Virginia City in Nevada.

His father was a successful merchant and sent his son to the public schools where Albert received his initial education.

He finished high school while staying with his aunt Henriette Levy Michelson in San Francisco.

After being on a naval cruise for two years, Albert A. Michelson returned to the academy and joined as an instructor in physics and chemistry in 1875.

In 1877 while in Annapolis, he conducted his first experiment on the speed of light.

In 1879 he determined that light travelled in air and in vacuum at 299,864 ± 51 km per second and 299,940 km per second respectively.

In 1879 he was transferred to the ‘Nautical Almanac Office’ in Washington which was a part of the ‘United States Naval Observatory’ where he worked with Simon Newcomb.

The academy granted him leave of absence and he went to Europe in 1880 to continue further studies on optics at the universities of Heidelberg and Berlin. He also studied at the ‘College de France’ and the ‘Ecole Polytecnique’ located in Paris. He stayed in Europe for two years. He resigned from the navy in 1881.

Albert A. Michelson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1907 for his experiments on the speed of light with his self-made optical instruments.

He also received many other awards such as the ‘Copley Medal’ in 1907, the ‘Henry Draper Medal’ in 1916 and the ‘Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society’ in 1923.