Frederick Sumner Brackett

Frederick Sumner Brackett ( born August 1, 1896 in Claremont, California, † 28 January 1988) was an American physicist and spectroscopist.

Brackett was from 1919 to 1920 observers at Mount Wilson Observatory. He took on the infrared spectra of the sun. During his PhD in physics at Johns Hopkins University, he encouraged the optical radiation of the hydrogen in a fluorescent tube. He watched as first the Brackett series of hydrogen.

Until 1927 he taught at the University of California, Berkeley. From 1927 he worked at the Fixed Nitrogen Lab of the Department of Agriculture and from 1936 as Director of the Biophysics Research of the National Institutes of Health ( NIH).

After the Second World War until his retirement in 1961, he headed the Department of Photobiology NIH.