[ 1930-31 | 1931-40
| 1940-46 | 1946-76 |
1976-2010 | Future Outlook
George R. Harrison Spectroscopy Laboratory History
The history of the Spectroscopy Laboratory falls naturally into
five divisions: its founding by George R. Harrison
in the Physics Department (1930-1931), basic
spectroscopic research on atomic structure (1931-1940), national
defense activities (1940-1946), research activities
as an Interdepartmental Laboratory under the direction of Richard
C. Lord (1946-1976), and the expansion of the
Laboratory research activities under the direction of Michael S.
Founding of the Spectroscopy Laboratory
When George R. Harrison moved from
Stanford University to become Professor of Experimental Physics
at MIT in 1930, he was asked by MIT's President, Karl T. Compton,
also a physicist, to indicate his needs for space in the new Eastman
Research Laboratories (Building 6), then under construction. These
needs included space for a Rowland circle of 10-meter diameter and
a large 21-foot vacuum spectrograph. The two men concluded that
these needs could not be met in the Eastman building, and they decided
to put up an additional building adjacent to the main research laboratories,
especially designed to house spectroscopic equipment. Compton was
personally involved in the design and oversaw its construction.
This building, the Spectroscopy Laboratory (Building 6A), was completed
in 1931, a full year before the adjacent Eastman Research Laboratories
were finished. It is believed to be the first building constructed
entirely for the purpose of conducting spectroscopy research. Its
windowless walls are more than four feet thick and effectively isolate
the interior from external thermal variations. The floors are also
isolated from external vibrations. In view of its massive construction,
it is surprising to realize that the Laboratory was built somewhat
as an afterthought.
As the Laboratory was an appendage of the Physics Department, all
of its staff members were physicists. In addition to Drs. Harrison
and Compton, they included Associate Professor J.C. Boyce and two
instructors, Dr. John Wulff, who later became Professor of Metallurgy,
and Dr. Henry M. O'Bryan, who later took a research position at
Sylvania. Two graduate research assistants, Walter E. Albertson
and Donald Weaver, had come with Harrison from Stanford; the former,
after earning a Ph.D., remained in the Laboratory for several years
and did fine work analyzing the spectra of complex rare earth atoms.
Although the Laboratory was just founded, it had many visitors from
other laboratories in the United States and abroad, who worked on
special problems for which the unique equipment developed in the
Spectroscopy Laboratory was needed. This tradition continues to
the present day.
Atomic Spectroscopy & MIT Wavelength
In its early years, the Spectroscopy Laboratory became famous
under Professor Harrison's leadership for its contributions to atomic
spectroscopy, namely the analysis of complex spectra, with some
emphasis on qualitative and quantitative analysis of materials.
During this period, Harrison became interested in developing special
machines for diminishing the complex and tedious labor of converting
spectroscopic data to usable form. The bottleneck in determining
atomic energy levels turned out to be the precision of wavelength
measurements, for which six- or seven-figure accuracy was required.
Harrison designed and constructed the first automatic comparator
for measuring spectral line wavelengths with high speed and precision.
By 1934 this instrument was able to scan, compute and record up
to 2000 seven-figure wavelengths from a 20-inch photographic spectrum
in 120 seconds. Thus, the Laboratory began the accumulation of thousands
of feet of 35mm motion picture film containing intensity traces
as a function of wavelength to the stated accuracy of seven figures.
This spectroscopic data eventually resulted in the MIT Wavelength
These tables, first published in 1939, by the MIT Press, contain
110,000 seven-figure wavelengths assigned to their elements of origin,
in accordance with the measurements in the Spectroscopy Laboratory
as well as those given in the literature, and are still in daily
use in laboratories throughout the world. A second and slightly
enlarged edition was published in 1969 with assistance from the
National Bureau of Standards.
A second major development in the 1930s was the application of
a new type of electromagnet, designed by Professor Francis Bitter
of the Physics Department, to high-field Zeeman effect studies.
Many rare earth and other complex spectra were studied in magnetic
fields of up to 100,000 gauss, and new orders of magnetic separation
of spectral lines became available at static fields up to 2.5 times
as intense as those previously attainable. This magnet proved to
be a particularly powerful tool for determining atomic quantum numbers
and spectral structure. Many of these spectral traces and photographs
were provided to analysts such as W.F. Meggers and C.C. Kiess of
the National Bureau of Standards and numerous other workers.
Starting in 1933, the Spectroscopy Laboratory hosted a six-week
summer course in spectroscopy for visitors from academia and industry.
At the end of the summer, the Spectroscopy Laboratory held the Summer
Conference on Spectroscopy, which drew an international attendance
of about 200 researchers. The published reports of these conferences
had a substantial impact on the field of quantitative emission spectroscopy.
In 1942, this conference was discontinued because of the World War
Furthermore, Harrison recognized the value of cooperative work
with researchers in other fields to which the new techniques of
spectroscopy could be applied, especially in the departments of
Chemistry, Biology and Metallurgy.
National Defense Research (1940-46)
During the period from 1940 to 1946, many of the Laboratory's scientists
became occupied with national defense and war work, and their spectroscopic
research projects were gradually reduced. During much of this time,
the Laboratory's facilities were used for spectrochemical analysis
for the Manhattan Project, and many thousands of uranium samples
collected from the first atomic reactor at the University of Chicago
were analyzed with the help of the 10-meter grating spectrograph.
During the war, Harrison served as Chief of the Optics Division
of the National Defense Research Committee, and became acquainted
with a vast array of scientists engaged in the war effort, including
Richard C. Lord, a physical chemist specializing in infrared and
Raman spectroscopy. This widening of horizons was to have important
consequences in the post-war future of the Laboratory.
Richard C. Lord, Director (1946-1976)
In 1942, Harrison became Dean of the School of Science at MIT, and
it became evident that a new Director for the Spectroscopy Laboratory
was needed. In addition, Harrison felt that the Laboratory's research
activities "should be expanded to other fields, in addition
to physics, where spectroscopic techniques were useful." The
appointment of Professor Richard C. Lord
as Director of the Laboratory in July 1946 and its transfer to interdepartmental
status constituted a scientific as well as administrative change.
Lord, a chemist, was a specialist in the spectroscopy of polyatomic
molecules, particularly in the infrared region. This part of the
spectrum had not been investigated hitherto in the Laboratory, but
instrumental developments during World War II had improved infrared
techniques and shown the scientific value of infrared research.
After 1946, the interest of Professor Harrison, now Dean of the
School of Science at MIT, turned to the development of spectroscopic
instrumentation. In 1949, he invented the echelle spectrograph,
which combines very high resolution with broad spectral range. He
developed engines for the ruling of diffraction gratings under interferometric
control, by which gratings of unprecedented size (as large as 400
x 600 mm) and optical performance were produced.
During Lord's tenure from 1946 to 1976, the Laboratory established
research programs in both infrared and Raman spectroscopy with substantial
funding, at first from the Office of Naval Research and later from
the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
Among the scientific achievements during this period were; the observation
of Coriolis-activated forbidden vibrational transitions; development
of tables of Coriolis coupling coefficients from symmetry arguments;
synthesis and complete vibrational analysis of a large number of
molecules in which deuterium replaced hydrogen; discovery and exploitation
of the anomalous far-infrared spectra of ring molecules; the first
vibrational analyses of the laser Raman spectra of proteins; and
the important demonstration by Raman spectroscopy that the conformation
of transfer RNA as determined by X-ray diffraction from a crystalline
sample is the same as that in the aqueous medium existing in living
Some fifty PhD theses in chemistry were based on work done in the
Laboratory in this period, and a like number of postdoctoral research
fellows and visiting scientists from the U.S. and 15 from foreign
countries came to use its facilities. In parallel with its development
of infrared techniques, especially in the demonstration of the power
of diffraction gratings in "bench top" spectrometers,
the Laboratory was a pioneer in the postgraduate training of research
personnel in infrared spectroscopy by establishing the first summer
training program in this field in 1950. In the period 1950-1972,
this program introduced 2100 scientists to infrared techniques and
With the arrival of Professors Charles H. Townes and Ali Javan
and their associates to the Laboratory in 1962, the possibilities
of using the recently invented laser in spectroscopic research began
to be explored. Townes was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in
1964 for his contributions in the 1950s to the development of the
maser and laser, and Javan had invented the gas laser in 1960. Their
achievements in the Laboratory include development of a version
of the Michelson-Morley experiment using infrared lasers, which
gave an improved upper limit on the anisotropy of space, or the
effect of "ether drift," and pioneering studies by Townes
and his colleagues of the stimulated Raman and Brillouin effects.
Another important achievement was the observation by Javan of the
first Lamb dip and its applications to measurement of the 1.15 micron
shift. This experiment marked the beginning of the field of high-resolution
laser saturation spectroscopy.
Michael S. Feld, Director (1976-2010)
These and other studies made apparent the importance of lasers to
spectroscopy and the study of dynamical processes in atoms and molecules.
With the selection of Professor Michael S.
Feld as Lord's successor in 1976, lasers become the central
research tool of the Laboratory. Professor Feld received his training
at the Institute, earning a PhD in physics in 1967. His special interest
was the interaction of intense light fields with atoms and molecules.
Professor Feld led the Laboratory into a new era, pursuing fundamental
studies and applications of lasers in various branches of science
and engineering. The strong interdisciplinary emphasis is characterized
by a widening set of active faculty participants from the physics,
chemistry, biology and engineering departments. Major
programs include high-resolution laser saturation spectroscopy, study
of dynamical processes in atoms and molecules, laser chemistry,
the application of lasers to nuclear physics and studies of structure
and function of biological molecules using resonance Raman and other
laser techniques. Achievements include the first observation
of superradiance by Feld and his coworkers, and the discovery of
a left-handed form of the DNA double helix by Professor Alexander
Rich of the Biology Department and his colleagues, accomplished
by analyzing X-ray diffraction patterns with the Laboratory's optical
analog comparator. Under Feld's directorship, there was a marked increase in the number of collaborations, including
colleagues from more than 10 institutions.
In 1985 Feld established
the Laser Biomedical Research Center (LBRC) at the laboratory with support from the
National Institutes of Health. With the LBRC, the Spectroscopy Laboratory became a leading research center in applications of spectroscopy to biomedicine. LBRC researchers developed techniques in fluorescence spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, multi-modal spectroscopy, and other technologies to image
living cells and diagnose diseases from arteriosclerosis to breast cancer.
Within this historic framework, the Spectroscopy Laboratory today
is pursuing fundamental and applied research in a variety of fields.
The Laboratory has wide interdisciplinary efforts and, in fact,
was in the first group of MIT's interdepartmental laboratories.
Currently, MIT faculty members from physics, biology, chemistry
and several departments in the School of Engineering pursue research
here. There is much collaborative activity, including strong interactions
with outside scientists from universities and medical centers across the country.