National Academy

The National Academy of Sciences concluded its three-day meeting in Washington at which the new "Tem ple of Sciences" was dedicated. Events:

1) Tragedy laid its hand on the academicians when Dr. Ernest Fox Nichols, of the Nela Research Laboratories, Cleveland, former President of Dartmouth and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, dropped dead of heart disease on the platform of the new auditorium in the midst of an address on the relation of the infra-red and electric wave spectra.

Dr. Nichols stopped in the middle of a sentence, leaned against the marble stand, and for a moment none realized what was happening. President A. A. Michelson and other scientists rushed to his side, ambulances were summoned, but the speaker was dead. The session was discontinued. Dr. Nichols was one of the most distinguished of American physicists. Born in Kansas in 1869 he was educated at the Kansas Agricultural College, Cornell University, Berlin, Cambridge, and held numerous honorary degrees. He taught at Colgate, Dartmouth, Columbia, became President of Dartmouth in 1909. Resigning in 1916 to become Professor of physics at Yale, his later years were punctuated by periods of ill health, but he held varied important positions in administration and research at Massachusetts Tech., the Carnegie Institution, the Bureau of Ordnances and Nela Park. The General Electric Company offered him absolute freedom and unsurpassed facilities for pure research; he returned there for his last years to avoid the strain of administrative work. Research was his home. He was one of the world's leading authorities on radioactivity, spectrum analysis, heat radiation of stars and planets, and pressure of light.

2) Major Gen. George O. Squier, former chief Signal Officer, U.S. Army, reporting the results of recent experiments in ocean cable work, stated that a universal automatic telegraph transmitter, applicable to radio, land lines and submarine cables, has been tested on artificial cables in the laboratory. The electron vacuum tube is facilitating the new development; an undreamed-of degree of cable efficiency will be possible by amplification of received cable signals. Cable and radio telegraphy each have their natural sphere of utility and are not essentially in conflict.

3) Dr. Raymond Pearl, famed Johns Hopkins biologist, threw a tomb into the ranks of the Drys, who had long believed that the science of physiology was on their side. Making public an investigation based on exact records of the drinking habits of more than 150,000 normal persons throughout their lives, he reached the conclusion that "moderate steady drinkers have a better expectation of life at all ages from 30 to the end of the life span than do total abstainers." Heavy drinkers have the poorest expectation of life at all ages after 30, except that heavy-drinking males from 65 on are about on a par with the total abstainers. The figures are calculated in the same manner as insurance life tables, and according to Dr. Pearl, the material is "the most critically adequate" in both quality and quantity that 'has ever been available for the study of the influence of alcohol on the duration of life.

4) Gold medals of the Academy for 'distinguished scientific achievement were awarded to: Otto Sven Petterson, Sweden, for studies in the chemistry and physics of the sea; Arthur Stanley Eddington, Cambridge, Eng land, for his interpretation of the Einstein theory applied to astronomical problems; C. V. Ludwig Charlier, Sweden, for contributions to astronomy; Bashford Dean, Columbia, for his Biography of Fishes; William Morton Wheeler, Harvard, for his Ants of the American Museum Congo Expedition; Ferdinand Canu, Versailles, France, for his study of the North American Bryozoa (small marine animals). The medals to foreign scientists were received by their respective embassies.