Farnsworth, Harrison E.

Harrison (Harry) Edward Farnsworth (1896-1989), professor of physics, was born in Ripon, Wisconsin, on March 24, 1896. He graduated from Ripon College in 1918 and earned his A.M. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Wisconsin in 1921 and 1922. His first published paper in 1922 reported that some secondary electrons were reflected without loss of energy, an observation which was at first criticized, but later confirmed. He taught at the University of Pittsburgh in 1918-19, was a teaching assistant and research fellow at the University of Wisconsin from 1919 to 1924 and associate professor at the University of Maine from 1924 until 1926, when he came to Brown as assistant professor of physics. He was promoted to associate professor in 1929 and professor in 1946. In 1960 he was designated a research professor and in 1963 was named the Annette L. R. Barstow University Professor. He was chairman of the Department of Physics in 1942-43 and a member of the executive committee of the department from 1954 to 1956. In 1941 he was on leave to work on a war project at M.I.T. The next year he was an investigator for the National Defense Research Council. At various times he was a consultant for the Office of Naval Research, the Brookhaven National Laboratory, and other industrial laboratories. He founded Brown’s laboratory of surface physics. He wrote many technical papers, and was an authority on the physics and chemistry of the surfaces of solids and a pioneer in the use of electrons for the study of metal crystal surfaces. He retired in 1970 and moved to Tucson, Arizona, where he set up a laboratory at the University of Arizona, which he later moved to his home, so that he continued his research almost until his death in Tucson on November 14, 1989.