Department of Physics and Astronomy

DEPARTMENT HISTORY

Chapter 3 - The O. H. Smith Years (1925 - 1952)
Page 7

When Orrin Harold ("O.H.") Smith was offered the physics department chair in the spring of 1925, he was already a physics teacher of some reputation in the Midwest. A graduate of Knox College and the recipient of a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois, Smith had been head of the physics department at Cornell College in Iowa since 1914. He had recently returned from a year's leave in China where he had been visiting professor of physics at Southeastern University in Nanking, serving as an adviser on the teaching of physics under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation.

Several factors influenced Smith's decision to come to DePauw: the laboratory was better equipped; there was a staff assistant (Simpson); the annual department budget at DePauw was substantially larger than at Cornell. The move was a tremendous blow to Cornell's physics program and a boon for DePauw; over the next 27 years, Professor Smith's department would produce physics majors of the highest caliber, with a majority of them becoming leaders in universities, industry, and government laboratories.

Upon arriving in the fall of 1925, Smith made some immediate changes in the physics curriculum, adding a Survey Course in General Physics for liberal arts students, a senior Reading Course, and a two-semester course in Electricity and Magnetism. In his first years at DePauw, Smith would typically handle two or three lecture courses per semester and supervise any reading or laboratory projects. The introductory physics lab remained Simpson's main responsibility, although she continued to offer the Radio Principles course in alternate semesters.

Among the first physics students recruited by Smith at DePauw were Wendell Furry and Charles Whitmer of the class of 1928. Both went on to careers typical of O.H. Smith students. Furry, after earning a Ph.D at the University of Illinois, did postdoctoral study as a National Research Council Fellow at the California Institute of Technology. While there, he gained international attention for his work on quantum electrodynamics done in collaboration with J. Robert Oppenheimer. He later became a professor of physics at Harvard. Whitmer received his Ph.D at Ohio State, worked for a time at the MIT Radiation Lab (whose director was Lee DuBridge, a Smith student from the Cornell days), and then went to Rutgers where he was professor of physics and department head for many years. In 1960, Whitmer became a Deputy in the Division of Pre-College Education of the National Science Foundation and in 1972 was honored by his alma mater with an honorary Doctor of Science degree.

In 1927, Simpson was promoted to assistant professor and, sometime in the summer of that year, married Professor Ralph Hufferd of the chemistry department. Professor Hufferd was an excellent organic chemist and an inspiring, forceful teacher, but his personality did not endear him to his colleagues. According to his department head, William Blanchard, Hufferd had "a habit of belittling other people, of criticizing other members of the faculty and the administration...even in the presence of students." Many of Hufferd's caustic barbs were directed at O.H. Smith, who Hufferd felt was less than competent. Not coincidentally, Smith noticed a distinct change in his working relationship with Simpson soon after she married Hufferd; her attitude toward Smith grew rude, if not openly hostile.

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