A brief history of WNSL
Under construction.
A. W. Wright
Arthur Williams Wright, for whom the Nuclear Structure Laboratory is named, held the first Ph.D. in science awarded in the New World. His doctoral dissertation -- on satellite mechanics -- was one of three, in different fields, accepted by Yale University for the degree in 1861.
Dr. Wright was born in 1836 in Lebanon, Connecticut and entered Yale after preparation at Bacon Academy in Colchester and at a private school in Canterbury. He received his B. A. degree in 1859. Both as an undergraduate and graduate student he studied mathematics, mineralogy, bottany and modern languages in addition to physics. He also studied law and was admitted to the bar.
From 1863 to 1868 he was a member of the Yale faculty, teaching first Latin and then Physics in the Scientific School. This was followed by postgraduate study at Heidelberg and Berlin and a brief period as Professor of Physics and Chemistry at Williams College before his return to the Yale faculty in 1872 as Professor of Molecular Physics and Chemistry. He held this professorship, later changed to that of Experimental Physics, until his retirement in 1906. Yale's original Sloane Physics Laboratory was built after his plans and under his direction.
Dr. Wright pioneered in many different areas of research in physics and astronomy. He developed the glow discharge preparation of reflecting optics and used these extensively in the first studies of polarization of the solar corona. He first discovered the occurrence of gases in stony meteorites and subjected them to extensive chemical and spectroscopic investigation. Immediately following the discovery of X-radiation, he was the first American to produce and the first to utilize this radiation in his analytic studies.
Dr. Wright was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. He became Professor Emeritus at Yale in 1906 and died, in New Haven, in 1915. (From the Dedication of the ESTU-1 Accelerator, 1987)
