Professor Michelson Dying

Professor Albert Abraham Michelson, the famous physicist and Nobel Prize Winner, who was reported to have died last year in a large number of European newspapers, which mistook a report of his serious illness for a report that he had died when actually he was by the time the report appeared already on the point of recovery, is now lying critically ill and it is feared that he is at the point of death. On the last occasion when his death was incorrectly reported, he had spent six months in hospital and the doctors had given up all hope because of his ago. Professor Michelson is in his 79th. year.

As soon as he recovered from his previous illness last year, Professor Michelson went to the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, near Los Angeles, in California, where Professor Einstein was doing research work recently, in order to continue his experiments for reducing to a finer figure his calculations of the speed at which light travels.

Born in Strelno, in Germany, Professor Michelson came to America as a child, While working as an instructor at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, as a young man, he began to devise methods for improving the determination of the velocity of light, and his experiments are regarded as the starting point of Einstein’s theory of relativity. From 1892 till last year, when he resigned, he held the Chair of Physica at Chicago University.

In 1928 Professor Michelson revealed another side of himself by holding an exhibition in Chicago of landscapes, protraits and caricatures, explaining that although he had never had any real instruction in painting he had been drawing since his student days. He had always been primarily interested, he said, in the aesthetic side of life, and it was through aesthetics that he had become interested in science.