Karl Taylor Compton (September 14, 1887 – June 22, 1954) was an American physicist and president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1930 to 1948. A researcher in electron physics and early experimenter on the photoelectric effect, Compton spent two decades at Princeton University before accepting the MIT presidency, where he transformed what had been primarily an engineering school into a research university with strong programs in basic science.
At MIT, Compton recruited leading scientists, created a School of Science, and centralized the Institute's relationship with industry, establishing one of the first university patent licensing programs. Working closely with Vice President Vannevar Bush, Compton expanded financial support for research and increased faculty autonomy from industrial sponsors. Outside MIT, Compton advocated strenuously for science funding. He was the founding chairman of the American Institute of Physics and chaired President Roosevelt's Science Advisory Board. With the New England Council, he helped lay the groundwork for the modern venture capital industry.
Compton forged new links between universities and the military establishment. During the Second World War, Compton was a founding member of the National Defense Research Committee, chairing the radar and detection research project. He oversaw the establishment of the MIT Radiation Laboratory, the first major federal research contract with a university and one of the largest R&D projects of the war. He led a radar coordination mission to the United Kingdom in 1943 and was chief of the Office of Scientific Research and Development's Office of Field Service, deploying civilian scientists to combat theaters. He served on the Interim Committee that advised President Truman on the use of the atomic bomb, and later publicly defended the decision in a widely discussed Atlantic Monthly article. As scientific advisor to General Douglas MacArthur in the Pacific, he was among the first Americans to enter Tokyo after the Japanese surrender.
After the war, Compton co-founded the American Research and Development Corporation, widely regarded as the first modern venture capital firm. He chaired President Truman's commission on universal military training and led the Research and Development Board of the Department of Defense before ill health forced his retirement in 1949. He served as chairman of the MIT Corporation from 1948, and he remained active as a trustee of the Ford, Rockefeller, and Sloan Foundations until his death at sixty-six.
Early life and education
Karl Taylor Compton was born on September 14, 1887, in Wooster, Ohio, the eldest child of Elias and Otelia (Augspurger) Compton. He grew up on and around the campus of the College of Wooster, where his father taught Latin, philosophy, and psychology before serving as the college's first dean. Elias had originally intended to become a missionary but went into teaching after graduate study in theology and psychology; he earned a doctorate from Clark University in 1889. His mother's family were Mennonite farmers of German origin who had settled in Ohio, and the household combined Presbyterian observance with an unusual intellectual openness. Karl's siblings—Mary (b. 1889), Wilson (b. 1890), and Arthur (b. 1892)—grew up in the same environment and all made careers in scholarship or public life. Beginning in 1897, the family spent summers camping at Otsego Lake in Michigan, where Karl developed a lasting taste for fishing, canoeing, hiking, and hunting that stayed with him for life.
The Compton children were shaped by Elias's wide-ranging curiosity. Alongside Homer and Walter Scott, the children read popular science writing about electricity and astronomy. Elias was one of a small minority of Wooster faculty who publicly defended evolutionary theory. At Wooster, Karl moved from a brief interest in biology to physics, where he served as a laboratory assistant to George Bacon and excelled in mathematics. He was also a competitive athlete—captain of the football team in his senior year—and was remembered for an inventive freshman prank involving the college heating plant's 150-foot smokestack that displayed his class numerals for weeks.
From the age of eleven, he took paid work to cover college expenses: carrying hods on construction projects, skinning mules, canvassing books, working on farms and in tile and brick factories, and surveying what he later recalled as the first mile of state-paved road in Ohio. He graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Philosophy degree in 1908 and completed a master's degree under Bacon the following year. His master's thesis, on the principle of the Wehnelt electrolytic interrupter, was published in the February 1910 issue of Physical Review. A job offer from a missionary college in Korea, which he had half expected to accept, materialized at the same moment; his father persuaded him to pursue a doctorate at a research university instead. Browsing university catalogs, he was drawn to Princeton by the presence of two Cavendish-trained physicists, James Jeans and Owen Richardson, and enrolled there in 1910.
Richardson—a legendarily poor lecturer—proved a difficult mentor, but Compton adapted. He focused his doctoral research on the photoelectric emission of electrons, contributing experimental evidence for Richardson's law of thermionic emission. Working with Richardson, he published several papers on the photoelectric effect and electron theory. Their joint 1912 paper in Science was among the earliest experimental confirmations of Einstein's 1905 explanation of photoelectric emission. In 1912, Compton received the Ph.D. summa cum laude, a distinction Princeton rarely awarded. He was also awarded the Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship. He then completed a postdoctoral year at Princeton before taking up his first teaching position.
Teaching career
In June 1913, Compton married his Wooster classmate Rowena Rayman and the couple traveled to Portland, Oregon, where he had accepted an instructorship in physics at the newly founded Reed College. He took sole charge of physics instruction and laboratory development, but the salary was too low to sustain a family once their daughter Mary Evelyn was born in December 1914. Richardson recommended him for a position at Yale. Princeton moved first, offering an assistant professorship, and Compton returned there in 1915.
At Princeton, his teaching acquired a reputation that his supervisor's had not. Richardson's lectures on electron theory were, by his own students' account, among the worst given in the field. Compton's "clear, goal-oriented" instruction became a cornerstone of Princeton's physics program. He declined an employment offer from Willis Whitney, director of research at General Electric, but agreed to serve as an outside consultant, an arrangement that would last more than a decade. He and his brother Arthur co-invented the Compton electrometer, a sensitive voltage-measuring device, during this period.
During the First World War, Compton contributed to the Allied scientific effort in several capacities. In the summer of 1917 he joined physicist Augustus Trowbridge at Princeton in studying sound ranging methods for locating enemy artillery, and was subsequently attached to Edison Laboratories for research on torpedo propulsion and submarine detection. From December 1917 through January 1919, working through Robert Millikan and the National Research Council, he served with the U.S. Signal Corps in Washington, D.C., and then in Paris as associate scientific attaché at the U.S. embassy, where he prepared reports on artillery-sound and submarine-detection techniques for military and naval intelligence.
Rowena died suddenly in October 1919 of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix, while expecting a second child. Compton remarried in July 1921. His second wife, Margaret Hutchinson, was the sister-in-law of a Princeton classics professor who had helped Compton through the period following Rowena's death. Margaret's father taught classics and mathematics at the University of Minnesota, and she was herself a Minnesota graduate who had gone into YWCA field work. The newlyweds honeymooned by canoe on the Boundary Waters Wilderness in northern Minnesota, covering two or three hundred miles over three weeks. They had two children: Jean Corrin (b. 1924) and Charles Arthur (b. 1927).
Returning to Princeton after the Armistice, Compton concentrated his research on electron collisions and became a pioneer in the experimental study of electrical plasmas, aggregates of subatomic particles whose behavior would later prove significant for controlled nuclear fusion. Over the following decade, his laboratory produced over one hundred papers on thermionic effects, ultraviolet spectroscopy, and the behavior of electrons in gases. He was made a full professor in June 1919.
Compton's leadership in professional societies steadily improved his standing in the discipline. He served as vice president of the American Physical Society in 1925 and president in 1927, chaired the physics section of the National Academy of Sciences from 1927 to 1930. He was also elected a fellow of the Optical Society of America and appointed a member of the American Philosophical Society (1923) and the National Academy of Sciences (1924). In 1926, a sabbatical year at the University of Göttingen placed him among a cohort of American physicists working under Max Born and James Franck, which included the young American graduate student J. Robert Oppenheimer.
The University of Chicago recruited him heavily during this period, at one point even offering him a signed contract. In 1924, it was proposed to hire Karl and his brother Arthur together; Arthur's work on X-ray scattering was then gaining the momentum that would earn him the Nobel Prize in 1927. Princeton countered with an elevated salary, research funds, and a new endowed chair, the Cyrus Fogg Brackett professorship, freeing Compton from undergraduate teaching to focus on graduate work and research. In 1929, he became head of the physics department, intent on building Princeton's program into the best in the country.
The MIT Corporation's search for a new president intersected this plan the following January. Gerard Swope, a GE executive and MIT Corporation member who had long known Compton as a consultant, asked him in a private meeting whether he would consider the post. Compton was reluctant: he had no administrative ambitions, no taste for fundraising, and a laboratory and graduate program at a satisfying peak. He was persuaded by a conversation with Frank Jewett, president of Bell Labs, who explained that what industry needed from MIT was not practical technicians but graduates broadly educated in science and mathematics; personnel capable of recognizing and exploiting new technological opportunities. "Jewett, who really knows these engineers, tells me I'm what the Institute needs," Compton told his wife Margaret on the drive home from Princeton Junction.
MIT presidency before World War II
Compton was inaugurated on June 6, 1930, before several thousand guests assembled in MIT's Great Court. The Great Depression created significant new headwinds for the Corporation's ambitious plans for science investments. The same month, Gerard Swope announced the Technology Loan Plan, a plan to raise tuition and provide loan-based financial assistance to students in need, drawing contributions from George Eastman, Alfred P. Sloan Jr., and several members of the du Pont family.
Academic reforms