Willard Libby

He married Leonor Hickey, a physical education teacher in 1940. Their twin daughters, Susan Charlotte and Janet Eva were born in 1945.

In 1966 Libby divorced Leonor and married noted nuclear physicist Leona Woods Marshall, one of the original developers of the first nuclear reactor of the world, ‘Chicago Pile-1’. Leona was associated with the ‘RAND Corporation’ headquartered at Santa Monica, California. Libby had two stepsons from his second marriage.

On September 8, 1980, he passed away in the ‘Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center’ located at the campus of the ‘University of California’, Los Angeles due to a blood clot in his lung, formed out of pneumonic complications.

He was born on December 17, 1908, in Grand Valley, Colorado to Ora Edward Libby and Eva May (née Rivers) as one of their three sons among five children. His parents were farmers.

His preliminary education began in a two roomed schoolhouse in Colorado. At five he relocated with his parents to Santa Rosa in California, where he was enrolled at the ‘Analy High School’ in Sebastopol, Sonoma County, California. He was a member of the school football team. In 1926 he completed his graduation from there.

He got enrolled at the ‘University of California’ at Berkeley in 1927 and obtained a B.S. in 1931. Thereafter he pursued his postgraduate doctorate studies at the university under the guidance of Wendell Mitchell Latimer. He earned Ph.D. in 1933 submitting his doctoral thesis on the "Radioactivity of ordinary elements, especially samarium and neodymium: method of detection". He found out that the chemical element samarium’s naturally enduring isotopes mainly decay by discharge of alpha particles.

In 1933 he was inducted by the ‘University of California’, Berkeley as instructor in its Department of Chemistry. He received successive promotions in the next ten years, first as an Assistant Professor in 1938 and then as Associate Professor in 1945.

During the 1930s he focussed on developing the sensitive Geiger counters for measuring weak natural and artificial radioactivity.

In 1941 he joined the professional fraternity ‘Alpha Chi Sigma’ (ΑΧΣ) and also received a ‘Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship’ and was elected to work at ‘Princeton University’.

However this Fellowship was interrupted when the United States entered the ‘Second World War’ on December 8, 1941, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the day before.

He volunteered his services to Nobel Laureate Harold Urey, who arranged the former’s leave from the ‘University of California’ so that he could work on the ‘Manhattan Project’, the wartime research and development project to develop atomic bombs at the ‘Columbia University’.

In 1949 he developed a process of radiocarbon dating or carbon-14 dating that uses the properties of radiocarbon (14C), a radioactive isotope of carbon, to help in ascertaining the age of ancient organic objects. This revolutionary process proved to be an immensely valuable device for archaeologists, anthropologists, geologists and palaeontologists and eventually became a standard tool.