Albert Michelson Research Paper

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Albert Abraham Michelson (surname pronunciation anglicized as Michael-son) was born December 19, 1852 in Strzelno, Poland into a Jewish family. He moved to the US with his parents in 1855, at the age of 2. He grew up in the mining town s of Murphy’s Camp, California and Virginia City, Nevada, where his father was a merchant. His family was Jewish by birth but non-religious, and Michelson himself was a lifelong agnostic. He spent his high school years in San Francisco in the home of his aunt, Henriette Levy (nee Michelson), who was the mother author Harriet Lane Levy. President Ulysses S. Grant awarded Michelson a special appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy in 1869. During his four years as a midshipman at the Academy, Michelson excelled in …show more content…

In the following year he obtained leave of absence to continue his studies in Europe. He visited the Universities of Berlin and Heidelberg, and the College de France and Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. In 1877, he married Margaret Hemingway, daughter of a wealthy New York stockbroker and lawyer. They has two sons and a daughter. Michelson was fascinated with the sciences, and the problem of measuring the the speed of light in particular. While at Annapolis, he conducted his first experiments of the speed of light, as a part of a class demonstration in 1877. His Annapolis experiment was refined, and in 1879, he measured the speed of light in air to be 299,864 + 51 kilometers per second, and estimated the speed of light in vacuum as 299,940 km/s, or 186,380 mi/s. After two years of studies in Europe, he resigned from the Navy in 1881. In 1883 he accepted a position as professor of physics at the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1890 he accepted a similar position at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, and in 1892 he became Professor of Physics and the first Head of Department at the new University of Chicago where in 1925 he was appointed to the first of the Distinguished Service

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