William Duane (physicist)
William Duane ( born February 17, 1872 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, † March 7, 1935 in Devon, Pennsylvania) was an American physicist.
Duane came from the 5th generation of Benjamin Franklin. He studied from 1888 at the University of Pennsylvania ( with a bachelor 's degree in his class ), from 1892 at Harvard University ( master's degree in 1895 at John Trowbridge ) and from 1895 as Tyndall Fellow at the University of Göttingen and Humboldt University of Berlin, where he studied under Max Planck and in 1897 received his doctorate ( with Walther Nernst ). From 1898 he was professor of physics at the University of Colorado. 1908 to 1913 he was in the laboratory of Pierre Curie and Marie Curie in Paris and dealt in this time with radioactivity, resulting in several publications emerged (but not directly to Marie Curie ). From 1913 he was assistant professor of physics at Harvard and from 1917 professor of biophysics at Harvard. During this time he dealt primarily with the medical use of X- rays especially for cancer and worked partly in Huntington Hospital. In 1934, he went into retirement. Long before he was but severely hampered by its diabetes disease and lost, for example, in 1927 parts of his vision.
The Duane -Hunt law in physics of X-rays is named after him. He was also known for a method of determining the dose of irradiation by X-rays on the ionization of the air, which he also helped in 1928 at an international conference in Stockholm to international recognition. He also developed methods radon to win, that was used for the treatment of cancer.
In 1924 he was embroiled in a controversy with Arthur Holly Compton, he from Compton's explanation deviating observations made at own independent measurements of the Compton effect, among other things, a material dependence, which he attributed to a secondary interaction of liberated by the X-ray photoelectron with matter. In the end, Compton prevailed.
1923-1924 he was president of the American Association for Cancer Research and 1922/23, the Executive Board of the Department of Physics of the National Research Council. In 1923 he was awarded the Comstock Prize of the National Academy of Sciences, whose member he was. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
In 1922 he was awarded the John Scott Medal of Philadelphia and the 1923 Leonard Price of the American Society of Radiology. He was an honorary doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Colorado. A physics building at the University of Colorado is named after him.
He was married in 1899 and had four children.