Albert Abraham Michelson (December 19, 1852 – May 9, 1931) was an American experimental physicist known for his work on measuring the speed of light and especially for the Michelson–Morley experiment. In 1907, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, becoming the first American to win the Nobel Prize in a science. He was the founder and the first head of the physics departments of the Case School of Applied Science and the University of Chicago.
Early life
Albert Abraham Michelson was born on December 19, 1852, in Strelno (now Strzelno, Poland), Prussia, into a Polish-Jewish family. He moved to the United States with his parents in 1855, at the age of 2. He grew up in the mining towns of Murphy's Camp, California, and Virginia City, Nevada, where his father was a merchant. His family was 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 (née Michelson), who was the mother of author Harriet Lane Levy.
His sister was the novelist Miriam Michelson.
Education and career
President Ulysses S. Grant awarded Michelson a special appointment to the United States Naval Academy in 1869. During his four years as a midshipman at the Academy, he excelled in optics, heat, climatology and technical drawing. After graduating in 1873 and two years at sea, he returned to the Naval Academy in 1875 to become an instructor in physics and chemistry until 1879, when he was posted to the Nautical Almanac Office, Washington (part of the United States Naval Observatory) to work with Simon Newcomb. The following year, he took a leave of absence to continue his studies in Europe; he visited the universities of Berlin and Heidelberg in Germany, and the Collège de France and École polytechnique in Paris, France.
