The Rest of the Story 6
Ed was born in Taylorville, a small town in central Illinois, in 1912. Some of his earliest memories were of scavenging electronic equipment like transformers, capacitors, and generators from old telephones.
He went to college at Purdue University and graduated in 1933 with a degree in electrical engineering. These were the years of the Great Depression, and many of his classmates, who had trouble affording college, would live in the basement of one of the research labs. After graduation, Ed obtained an exchange fellowship to spend a year in Germany. On the ship traveling across the Atlantic, he met Beth Busser, another exchange student from Bryn Mawr College who was studying German literature. Ed eventually attended Harvard University for graduate school. In 1937 he married Beth, and in 1938 he earned a PhD in Physics.
By 1940 war had broken out in Europe, and the Radiation Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology opened. Ed has hired, and joined a team at the MIT Rad Lab that was developing radar equipment to assist England against Nazi Germany. He worked with Nobel Prize winners like Isidor Rabi and Norman Ramsey, and learned much about radio-frequency electronics. During these busy years, Ed and Beth had two sons.
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When World War II ended, Ed returned to Harvard on the faculty, and had to figure out what his research topic would be. Rabi had been studying nuclear magnetic moments in molecular beams, and Ed wondered if similar effects could be observed in a solid. By Christmas 1945, Ed and his coworkers measured resonance absorption of an oscillating magnetic field by nuclear magnetic moments in paraffin wax.
For this discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance, Ed Purcell shared the 1952 Nobel Prize in Physics with Felix Bloch. His discovery ultimately led to Magnetic Resonance Imaging, which is widely used in medicine today.
And now you know THE REST OF THE STORY.
Good day!
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| Edward Purcell (1912–1997) |
This blog post was written in the style of Paul Harvey’s “The Rest of the Story” radio program. You can find my five previous “The Rest of the Story” blog posts here, here, here, here, and here.
Edward Purcell is cited in Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology several times for
- his article “Life at Low Reynolds Number,”
- his work with Howard Berg on bacterial chemotaxis,
- his E&M textbook with David Morin, originally part of the Berkeley Physics Course,
- his contributions to magnetic resonance imaging.
Source: http://hobbieroth.blogspot.com/2026/06/ed-was-born-in-taylorville-small-town.html
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