November 19, 1998
Written Appreciation
Distributed at the meeting of the MIT Faculty, November 18, 1998
Resolution:
Congratulations to Institute Professor Emeritus
Arthur Robert von Hippel
on the occasion of his 100th Birthday on
November 19, 1998
Professor Arthur Robert von Hippel, Institute Professor Emeritus since 1962 in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is widely recognized for his outstanding research in dielectrics, molecular science, and molecular engineering. He founded the MIT Laboratory for Insulation Research (L.I.R.) in 1940, pioneering in materials research, measurements, and instrumentation, and served as its head until his first retirement in 1964. His research theme was of molecular engineering for the "making of materials to order." If atoms are relatively well understood, they can be used as building blocks for design purposes with physicist as architect using the hundred-odd atoms of the Periodic System. His work has included ferroelectrics and ferromagnetics; electric breakdown; dielectric polarization, rectifiers and photocells; gas discharges; and solid-state physics. He is distinguished for his pioneering research in the field of molecular science and molecular engineering, which he has described as a "broad new discipline ... comprising the structure, formation, and properties of atoms, molecules, and ions; of gases, liquids, solids and their interfaces; the designing of materials and properties on the basis of this molecular understanding; and their imaginative application for devices." The L.I.R. pioneered in materials research, measurements, and instrumentation, evolving to the present day MIT Center for Materials Science and Engineering and to my laboratory, the MIT Laboratory for Electromagnetic and Electronic Systems. The Material Research Society's highest award, the von Hippel Award, is an international hallmark of excellence in the field of materials research. Von Hippel was the first recipient of this award in 1977, thereafter named for him. The Society notes that L.I.R. pioneered the collaborative, interdisciplinary research that subsequently has taken the identity of "materials science." The Award recognizes those qualities most prized by materials scientists -- brilliance and originality of intellect, combined with a vision that transcends conventional scientific disciplines. Nominees must have outstanding scientific credentials, their scientific work must have had a real impact on materials research, and they must have had demonstrated an interdisciplinary approach to materials research.
Professor von Hippel is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the New York Academy of Sciences, and the Washington Academy of Sciences, and a member of Sigma Xi, the American Chemical Society, and the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.
In 1952 he was appointed chairman of the Conference on Electrical Insulation and Dielectric Phenomena of the National Research Council, and was J.B. Whitehead Memorial Lecturer at the 1960 Conference. From 1964 to 1965 he served as scientific advisor to the Office of Naval Research, Washington, D.C. and received the Superior Civilian Service Award from the Department of the Navy on October 27, 1965. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1977 [3].
I met with Prof. von Hippel on March 10, 1987 to reminisce about important events in his life and to prepare for a 90th birthday celebration at MIT for which many of his family, friends, past students and colleagues were to attend. Thereafter, there were special issues of the IEEE Transactions on Dielectrics and Electrical Insulation [1] and of Ferroelectrics [2] dedicated to him. At the occasion of von Hippel's 90th birthday, I also promised to organize another birthday celebration a decade later on his 100th birthday, and here we all are.
In 1969-70 I was a student in Prof. von Hippel's two-term course at MIT, "From Atoms to Living Systems." As part of the course work, I used to meet weekly with von Hippel to discuss physics. His long-time secretary Aina Sils served cookies and tea. His lectures included many slides about the subject currently being studied. Occasionally a slide of personal history would slip in, such as a picnic scene with a dignitary such as Albert Einstein. Then Prof. von Hippel would tell us some anecdote about the famous people in the slide.
Von Hippel's life is an inspiring story because he was involved in both World Wars, having to leave Hitler's Germany because of a Jewish wife, yet knowing many of the major scientific achievers of the twentieth century as a student and colleague, including Bohr, Sommerfeld, Heisenberg, Wien, Courant, Debye, Born, Franck, Hertz and Pauli, and in America, Loeb, Einstein, and Oppenheimer.
The recorded history of the von Hippel family goes back to the 14th century and includes family members prominent in their times. While many relatives were large land-holders or in the military service, von Hippel's grandfather Arthur was one of the first professors of ophthalmology and his father Robert was a professor of criminal law at the University of Göttingen. Arthur Robert von Hippel was born in Rostock, Germany on Novermber 19, 1898.
After grammar school he went for nine years to the "humanistische Gymnasium" in Göttingen, obtaining a good classical education with nine years of Latin and six years of Greek in addition to French and English, with excellent science and mathematics. He feels it is a great mistake that American schools today do not teach languages to the extent of his European education.
A teacher introduced von Hippel to the "Youth Movement," which was a reaction to the "class state" with special privileges for the upper class, slightly balanced by some social obligations. Upper and lower classes lived essentially separate lives without much intermingling or understanding, and the industrial age led to appalling exploitation, especially of child labor. Social services were minimal and beggars abounded.
As part of the reaction to this state, the youth group "Wandervogel" (migrant birds) was formed which hiked through Germany and neighboring countries, sleeping in barns, helping with farm chores, rediscovering and collecting old folk songs, cooking outdoors, playing musical instruments, and making friends everywhere. Abandoned houses and later even old castles were fixed up as homes for transient groups. While the normal size of a hiking group ranged from five to ten boys, thousands might come for special fests. The ethical code of the youth movement was very strict. A solemn pledge was given to live a life of purity, responsibility, and mutual helpfulness. This promise guided von Hippel all his life.
The first large scale test of this oath came during World War I. People of the youth movement wore an identifying colored string on their uniform which made immediate friends independent of rank. The youth movement lost more than half its men, about 10,000, in combat during World War I. Von Hippel concludes that if they had lived, World War II and the assumption of power by the Nazis might never have occurred.
Von Hippel was the only child in the family with experimental inclinations, allowing him to install a private lighting system in his room for late night reading. However, a carbide lamp developed for after-dark bicycle-riding resulted in a "bomb" that severely cut his left thumb.
World War I broke out in the summer of 1914. Being yet too young for military service, von Hippel was drafted for home defense. With older friends shipped out to war, von Hippel found himself one of the oldest members of the youth movement group and had to assume local leadership.
School and life were now serious business, with a morning assembly reading the names of old friends who had died in battle. Food rationing began. Time passed quickly and the war seemed an endless slaughter. By 1916 many of von Hippel's friends had been killed in battle, and patriotism gave way to quiet and hungry endurance. Terminating his high school education a half-year early, he joined the army as a buck private in the field artillery. He was an artillery officer in World War I, "trying not to kill myself in mountain warfare."
He lived in a world of ideals and was rudely shaken under military rule. Slowly he toughened and after five months was ready to be shipped to France. He was sent to the most southern part of the Western front, the mountain zone of Alsace-Lorraine. After an officers' course he became a lieutenant. He points out that his friend was a much better soldier but stayed a sergeant because he did not have a high school diploma. On furloughs to Göttingen, there was a sad accounting of friends killed. By the end of the war, 50% of his class were dead.
By November, 1918 the armistice went into effect. However, instead of the peace of human understanding came the peace of revenge. Germany was starved for years and loaded with intolerable reparations. These conditions led directly to Hitler and World War II.
When he joined the Army in 1916, his father, then rector of the University of Göttingen, expected him to be a student of law. An uncle who was director of a big coal mining concern tried to make him a mining engineer, but after the war with remembrance of traveling to a deep mine, he realized that fresh air had become a necessity of life after living outdoors during the war years.
He considered medicine and went to the Anatomical Institute but "the dead babies in pickle-jars did not appeal to me." An old teacher encouraged him to become a physicist, so he enrolled in the famous "Naturwissenschaftliche Fakultät" of the Georgia Augusta University at Göttingen. His teachers included Hilbert on classical mechanics, Hilbert's assistant Courant, Pohl for physics, and Debye who taught theoretical physics. On Debye, von Hippel writes that "Everything seemed glass-clear, while you sat in front of him; but when you went afterwards down the stairs, you stared into the unknown."
Continuing the "Youth Movement" ideals of joyful exuberance, friendship, and outdoor activities, von Hippel and friends founded the "Akademische Gilde."
Contrary to the "peace of brotherhood" promised at the end of WWI, Germany was blockaded and the von Hippel family with the rest of Germany lived on a starvation diet with minimal home heating. Galloping inflation devastated money. Soon, von Hippel's family and other professors had their salary paid in cash every day, standing in line. Immediately after the money was received, the whole family spread throughout the town to purchase whatever food and necessities could be had, before the value of the German Mark dropped further. Anyone who had relied on savings, mortgages, or other investments based on currency was wiped out. Von Hippel showed me an old worthless 100,000 Mark note and told me that he had a 1-million Mark note somewhere.
The breakdown of the economy inflamed the revolutionary climate, and communist governments formed in various regions of Germany. Von Hippel and friends organized a small nationalist counterforce as part of a house-defense team.
With order temporarily restored, von Hippel returned to his studies, not sure he was cut out to be a scientist. He ran with friends for the office of "National Representative" in an All-German student election which won, and von Hippel found himself "cultural representative" of the German students. He escaped for the summer term of 1921 to Munich to live in a climate of theater, music, and artistic life before becoming a "professional." After this carefree life he found himself broke. The message from his father: "Out of money; complete studies in science or starve."
Göttingen in the early twentieth century was a "Center of the Scientific Revolution" from classical physics to quantum mechanics. Max Born had succeeded Debye and attracted a brilliant group of young theoretical physicists. James Franck taught experimental science. Franck and Gustav Hertz had done the famous Franck-Hertz experiment demonstrating that electrons colliding with the atoms of mercury vapor lose kinetic energy in discrete quanta and that the excited mercury atoms re-emit that energy as discrete photons with energy hv.
Niels Bohr came in 1922 to present his new theory of the Periodic System at the Institute of Theoretical Physics. With von Hippel as student in the audience, Sommerfeld with his student Heisenberg in tow disagreed with Bohr's theory. Then Born with student Pauli also disagreed with Bohr. This was a turning point in von Hippel's life. Convinced that theoretical physics was a calling reserved for geniuses, he then enlisted as a Ph.D. student in the Institute for Applied Electricity. He finished his thesis in early spring 1924, summa cum laude, designing and building a new type of thermo-microphone which allowed transmission of radio broadcasts as free as possible of frequency distortion. Vacationing in Italy before making a final professional decision, he realized that he could enjoy art deeply but could not produce it, so he returned home to an assistant position at the Physics Institute in Jena of Prof. Max Wien, who was the inventor of the quenched spark gap, necessary for wireless communication before the advent of electronic tubes. Wien used his spark-gap technique to study the conductivity in liquids at very high field strengths, discovering true deviations from Ohm's law now known as the first and second Wien effects.
Von Hippel's next two years concerned studying the sputtering of metals where he demonstrated that the metal was released as atoms from the cathode by positive ion bombardment.
Von Hippel's assistant years in Jena from the fall of 1924 to the summer of 1927 were full of scientific work and happy friendships. He helped in preparing lecture demonstrations, advising Ph.D. students, and in giving seminars.
In the spring of 1927 von Hippel became engaged to Marianne von Ritter, a pupil of his aunt. He was also offered a one-year Rockefeller fellowship and went to the University of California at Berkeley to measure the ionization characteristics of mercury atoms by electron impact. He found time to hike and drive around California and he was friendly with Prof. Leonard Loeb, specialist in gas discharges, and Robert Oppenheimer from Cal. Tech who also lectured at Berkeley. The American Interlude provided adventure and new friends, and he had been offered assistant professorships at three universities and tentatively completed a difficult experimental study. However, he returned to Jena, Germany for a year as Privat-Dozent (assistant professor) and to marry Marianne von Ritter. Sadly, she soon died in January 1929, a victim of a flu epidemic.
To stay near the von Ritter family, von Hippel was a Privat-Dozent at the Physikalische Institute in Göttingen from 1929-33 and soon married James Franck's daughter Dagmar in 1930. With the rising tide of anti-semitism and the coming of the Nazis, marrying a Jew was risky, but von Hippel had taken a stand as an anti-Nazi and had written a counter-declaration for the Gilde and youth movements.
Scientifically, this last period in Göttingen was fruitful. Von Hippel developed a basic understanding of electric breakdown in gases and single crystals, and of the meaning of Lichtenberg figures.
The crisis in Germany was approaching its climax: the University Rector, an ardent Nazi, called a meeting of the faculty and abolished the university constitution. Nazi stormtroopers were present to break any resistance. Old "friends" no longer kept contact.
At this time a new European-type university was being founded in Istanbul and about thirty European professors were hired to staff it, including von Hippel who established a Laboratory of Electrophysics in an old palace. However, jealousies of the old Turkish faculty, misunderstandings, and being in a strange culture made life unpleasant here, so after one year the von Hippel family left Turkey. After first vacationing in the summer of 1934 in Greece, Palestine, and Asia Minor, von Hippel accepted an invitation from Niels Bohr to lecture at the Technical University in Copenhagen as a guest professor from January 1935-1936. On the way to Denmark they spent Christmas in Göttingen, but the atmosphere was depressing because most people had become Nazi followers.
In those days all scientific equipment had to be built. Von Hippel had the shop build a spectrograph and studied the detailed steps of electric breakdown in gases and the alkali-halide crystals. Niels Bohr enticed von Hippel to plan a High Voltage Laboratory of 1-2 million volts for nuclear excitation and disintegration experiments. The van de Graaff and Cockcroft-Walton machines were just on the horizon and quite untried. Von Hippel suggested a cascaded transformer arrangement just being developed in Dresden, Germany, allowing von Hippel a chance for a last look at Hitler's Germany where he found that many of his friends had become Nazis.
Von Hippel received an offer from Prof. Karl Compton in 1936 to join the MIT faculty and become "the physicist of the Electrical Engineering Department." His starting salary was about $3,500 per year, so small that when his three boys were in the hospital with infections, he had to sell his Handbook of Physics to pay the bills. His first assignment was to teach with E. Guillemin the introductory course "Circuits and Fields." The subject was new to him and he had little time to prepare. However, because his children got scarlet fever and the whole family was quarantined for thirty days, he had ample time to prepare. Even at MIT there were professional jealousies, and he had to have his students testify that he did not mistreat them. He also had to give a colloquium to demonstrate that his pronunciation was understandable. His first Ph.D. student, Mr. Molnar, worked on the color center in alkali-halide crystals and found the M-bands named after him. Molnar was eventually scheduled to become president of the Bell Laboratories except for his premature death. Von Hippel became associate professor in 1940 and professor in 1947.
During this time von Hippel continued his love of the outdoors by exploring New Hampshire and Maine, and eventually purchased land and built a log cabin vacation home in Passaconway, New Hampshire.
In 1939 with a grant of $5,000 von Hippel founded the Laboratory for Insulation Research, breaking away from classical engineering concepts and departmental constrictions. The name was chosen to justify having a group of physicists and chemists in an electrical engineering department, as insulation is of obvious concern to electrical engineering and also avoided offending other people's interests, but this name later proved to be much too narrow. The Laboratory became internationally known in the field of modern materials research.
Before WWII, sources of support were industrial contracts. An especially challenging problem arose from Colonel Behne, founder of IT&T, for the manufacture of selenium rectifiers, up to that time manufactured in his German plant. The war in Europe had cut off this source of supply and the knowledge of how to make them. A New York factory had only a 5% yield of good rectifiers that had an acceptable ac to dc rectification characteristic. Von Hippel became a consultant to IT&T and accepted a research contract for his laboratory. After achieving good rectifiers in the normal three-day heating cycle, the laboratory developed an electroplating process that produced rectifiers in twenty minutes, resulting in a number of MIT patents, including selenium photo cells by electro-plating.
With the US entrance into WWII, there were rumors of von Hippel as a spy, but this was quickly dispelled with his US citizenship in 1942, the earliest possible allowed date because of his involvement in radar dielectrics.
Radar development was concentrated in the MIT Radiation Laboratory with the Laboratory for Insulation Research responsible for the development, measurement, commercial manufacture, and technical applications of radar dielectrics. Von Hippel was a member of both laboratories. L.I.R. had to create standard measurement techniques and equipment to determine the dielectric properties of many materials as a function of temperature from dc to microwave frequencies. At that time, the decimeter and centimeter wavelength ranges were virtually unexplored, and L.I.R. had to develop new precision instruments for commercial manufacture and distribution to government and industry laboratories in the US and Allied countries. In recognition of "outstanding services to his country," he was awarded the President's Certificate of Merit, the second highest civilian award, in October 1948.
Polymers such as polystyrene and polyethylene were upgraded as extremely low-loss dielectrics and their useful temperature range extended with additives to allow the Navy to pull radar cables through battleship boiler rooms. Dielectric properties of plastics, rubbers, ceramics, and glasses were measured by the newly formed Dielectric Measurements Group and published in the classified "Tables of Dielectric Materials."
The development of new materials required setting up of inorganic and organic chemistry laboratories, x-ray and electron diffraction facilities, and electric and optical spectroscopy measurements. In producing high dielectric constant ceramics, L.I.R. had discovered the ferroelectricity of barium titanate and made high voltage capacitors and ceramic delay lines. Previous experience with selenium photocells involved L.I.R. in infrared photocells of the thallous-sulfide type. Dielectric studies also led to dielectric heating for rapid woodcuring.
Through all these activities L.I.R. grew large and crowded so that (with the outwitting of fire codes) the MIT Building 4 laboratory with a high ceiling required the building of a balcony. In addition, there were laboratories in Building 10 and the Radiation Lab Building 24 with a large shop in the basement. This scattering over widely separated buildings aggravated the problem of unified action.
To have a close liaison between L.I.R. and government agencies responsible for procurement and applications of dielectric materials, the War Committee on Dielectrics was formed with the Army, Navy, and War Production Board.
As the end of the European War approached in 1945, von Hippel volunteered to go at armistice time to Germany, in order to help with his knowledge of the country and people, as well as to find family and friends. He was offered the rank of Army colonel for this purpose but because he was greatly overworked he wound up in the hospital for a thyroid operation and did not go to post-war Europe until 1952.
By this time von Hippel realized his challenge, to transform the field of materials research into the molecular designing of materials and devices. Because of the wartime performance of the L.I.R., they received the first Army-Navy-Air Force contract for peacetime work. Co-workers from many nations joined L.I.R., and von Hippel's first book, Dielectrics and Waves [4], (dedicated to Niels Bohr and James Franck) was written and was published in 1954 simultaneously with the book Dielectric Materials and Applications [5] (dedicated to Karl Taylor Compton) which grew out of a 1952 MIT summer session course trying to teach scientists, engineers, manufacturers, and users of dielectrics to speak each other's languages and appreciate multiple problems, failures, and advances. For the first book von Hippel considers "dielectrics" as the usual insulators, but also any nonmetal, and even metals as a limiting case. "Waves" is in the title of the first book to represent electromagnetic waves, probability waves of quantum mechanics, and the elastic waves of crystal lattices. Focus was on polarization, magnetization, and conduction trying to bring together physicist, chemist, and electrical engineer. The latter book contained as an Appendix an unclassified edition of the Tables of Dielectric Materials and hoped to establish alliances between research worker, development engineer, manufacturer, field engineer, and actual user of "nonmetals." In 1956 another summer session on Molecular Engineering resulted in the book Molecular Science and Molecular Engineering [6]. Finally, the 1963 summer course on "The Molecular Designing of Materials and Science" was published in 1965 [7]. Since the participants came from a gamut of professions, chaos was avoided by insisting that every lecturer express concepts in graphic language before mathematical formulation clouded the issues. Von Hippel had a friendship with M. C. Escher because he felt a relationship with Escher's art and molecular designing. Escher made a woodcut, "The Thinker," for this last book, showing a man in a foolscap contemplating a "screwy" model in puzzled confusion.
Throughout its existence, L.I.R. strove for a synthesis of knowledge, drawing research students in with unofficial agreement from the MIT departments of physics, chemistry, electrical engineering, metallurgy, etc. A joint education in "molecular science" and "molecular engineering" made firm allies of the scientists striving for a deepening understanding and the engineers striving for intelligent applications.
Von Hippel laments that "the securing of funds for the creation and maintenance of facilities as well as for the salaries of staff and students falls also to the unhappy lot of the research professor in charge." Expenses were large. For example, the first single crystals of magnetite ever grown were produced in L.I.R. and cost $20,000 each. The cost of one Ph.D. student from baccalaureate to doctoral student was $40,000 and L.I.R. educated sixty.
The Laboratory of Insulation Research at MIT educated about sixty doctorate students, two Electrical Engineering degrees, forty-seven Master Degree theses, a large number of bachelor theses, and numerous post-doctorate workers from all over the world, many of them later renowned. At the time of von Hippel's official retirement in 1964, L.I.R. had about seventy members in eight research groups, each headed by a professor. Seven of these groups helped form the new Center for Materials Science and Engineering:
As recognition today the Center has a von Hippel reading room.
A two-day Conference on the Structure and Properties of Dielectric Materials was held at MIT on June 16-17, 1964 to honor Prof. von Hippel upon his retirement. However, Prof. von Hippel still kept on teaching and performing research as there was still uncompleted work of major importance: dielectric spectroscopy, electric strength of materials, and other unpublished material. To avoid loss of this backlog of important knowledge, von Hippel continued writing, teaching, and research as a small residual L.I.R. He became taken with the question: How does Nature proceed with its design in creating living systems? Following the theme "from atoms to living systems," he studied electrobiology through better understanding of molecular electrochemistry of liquids and solids. This resulted in seventeen further Technical Reports (new series) focusing on the polarization and conduction of pure water and perfect ice single crystals and the three main properties of H2O molecules -- hydrogen bonding, dipolar action, and ion formation. However, he realizes that any premature optimism about our intelligence is squashed when the spotlight turns to biology. He acknowledges that to study biology today you must be a real biologist equipped with all modern tools -- not just a friend of biology and medicine by osmosis. Still, he felt that his ideas, approaches and findings might prove useful for the next generation. His last publication was "From Atoms Toward Living Systems" [8]. His last student, Keith W. Karvate, received a Sc.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 1979 with the thesis "Electrical Surface Studies on Hexagonal Ices and Their Interpretation."
Von Hippel notes how ingeniously Nature uses water as a solvent, reactant, and structuring agent and that industrial pollution of water is a crime against life on earth. Knowledge automatically confers responsibility for a balanced utilization and preservation of this planet's resources. He feels that the molecular designer of nonliving materials has proven a keen inventor but at times a public menace because of the design of non-decompostable throw-away materials without regard to Nature. His applications of materials science to biological systems also inspired other MIT colleagues to apply their expertise to biological systems in part resulting in the large commitment made by MIT to bioengineering.
[1] The 1988 CEIDP Digest on Literature on Dielectrics, "A tribute to Arthur R. von Hippel," IEEE Transactions on Dielectrics and Electrical Insulation, Vol. 23, No. 5, October 1988, pp. 789-895.
[2] Ferroelectrics, Vol. 35, 1992.
[3] A.R. von Hippel, "Life in Times of Turbulent Transitions," ed. Frank von Hippel, Stone Age Press, Anchorage, Alaska, 1988.
[4] A.R. von Hippel, Dielectrics and Waves, John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1954.
[5] A.R. von Hippel, Ed., Dielectric Materials and Applications, The Technology Press of MIT and John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1954.
[6] A.R. von Hippel, Molecular Science and Molecular Engineering. The Technology Press of MIT and John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1959.
[7] A.R. von Hippel, Ed., The Molecular Designing of Materials and Devices, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1965.
[8] A.R. von Hippel, "From Atoms Toward Living Systems," Materials Research Bulletin, V. 14, pp. 273-299, 1979.
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Created: Nov 18, 1998
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Modified: Dec 3, 1998|
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