Eli Whitney Blake, Jr.

Eli Whitney Blake, Jr. ( born April 20, 1836 in New Haven, Connecticut; † January 10, 1895 in Hampton, Connecticut ) was an American physicist.

Career

His father was Eli Whitney Blake, Sr., the inventor of the steam-powered rock crusher, and great-nephew of Eli Whitney, the inventor of the gin (Cotton Gin ). Eli Whitney Jr. also showed an early interest: as a child he lost when experimenting with gunpowder some phalanges.

He graduated in 1857 at Yale, taught it one year at a private school in Unionville, Connecticut, before he continued his studies, first at the Sheffield Scientific School in New Haven, then three and a half years in Germany, where he worked in Heidelberg with Robert Wilhelm Bunsen and Gustav Robert Kirchhoff, in Marburg under Hermann Kolbe, and in Berlin with Heinrich Wilhelm Dove and Heinrich Gustav Magnus studied mainly chemistry but also physics. After his return to the United States he taught these two subjects also from 1866 to 1867 at the University of Vermont in Burlington. From 1868 to 1869 he was professor of physics at Columbia College in New York and from 1869 to 1870 at Cornell University. In 1870, he followed then a call to the Brown University, where he held the chair of physics until his death in 1895.

Blake researched mainly acoustics and electricity. He developed in the years 1876 and 1877, shortly after Alexander Graham Bell had patented the telephone, together with John Peirce and William F. Channing a telephone receiver, which had a much higher fidelity than Bell's patented prototype.