Name Edward Ramberg Books Electrodynamics Role Physicist Siblings Lucy Ramberg | Died January 9, 1995 Nephews Mario Capecchi Education Cornell University | |
Parents Walter Ramberg, Lucy Dodd Ramberg | ||
Edward G. Ramberg (June 14, 1907 in Florence, Italy – January 9, 1995) was an American physicist who contributed to the early development of electron microscopy and color television. He was the uncle of Mario Capecchi, a 2007 Nobel laureate. His mother was an American painter, Lucy Ramberg (née Dodd), and his father a German archaeologist, Walter Ramberg. His father was killed while serving in World War I.
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Life and Education
Ramberg and his mother moved from Italy to Munich for the remainder of World War I, and in 1920 they moved to his mother’s family home in Portland, Oregon. He graduated from Lincoln High School in 1922. That year he enrolled in Reed College, but two years later he transferred to Cornell University. During the years 1925 to 1927, he took a hiatus and worked for Bausch & Lomb on optical computing. Upon receipt of his bachelor's degree from Cornell in 1928, he stayed at the University to work with Floyd K. Richtmyer. In 1930, Ramberg went to study with Arnold Sommerfeld at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich. He was granted his Ph.D. in 1932.
Edward and his wife (Sarah) were quakers and, for that reason, during World War II he did alternative services that include: working at a mental institution, clearing swamps and served for testing vaccines against tropical diseases.
Career
Upon return to the United States from Munich, Ramberg returned to Cornell and continued the work on which he based his thesis: X-ray satellites and line widths. In 1935, he left Cornell to take a position at RCA to work on both theoretical and experimental work on secondary emission, pickup tubes, and field electron emission. He later took part in the development of the theory of thermoelectric refrigeration and image tube aberrations and in demonstrating the mathematical operability of a multistage electrostatic electron multiplier. He also took part in construction of one of the first electron microscopes in the mid-1940s. He remained at RCA until 1972.
In addition to working at RCA, he was a visiting professor at the University of Munich in 1949 and, he was a Fulbright lecturer at the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt 1960-1961. In addition to co-authoring a number of books, he also translated Electrodynamik, Arnold Sommerfeld’s third volume in his six-volume Lectures on Theoretical Physics.