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2026-10-04 AIP Niels Bohr Library & Archives: finding aid

URL: https://history.aip.org/ead/20010114.html (Chrome; reached through query 3 in the Google note)

Findings [web]

  • Earle Hesse Kennard (2 Aug 1885, Columbus, Ohio to 31 Jan 1968). B.A. Pomona 1907; Rhodes Scholar, B.S. Oxford 1911; Ph.D. Cornell 1913. At Cornell 1912-1946 "except for a brief period as an instructor at the University of Minnesota, 1914 to 1916" (which fits the paper's "University of Minnesota, August, 1916"). Professor of physics at Cornell 1926. "Kinetic Theory of Gases" 1938. Edited the 3rd-5th editions of Richtmyer's "Introduction to Modern Physics". Consultant to the David W. Taylor Model Basin (US Navy) from 1941; head of the Hydro-Mechanics Laboratory 1946-49 and the Structural Mechanics Laboratory 1950-57; scientific consultant to 1960, then contractor (vibration theory, with Ralph C. Leibowitz).
  • Collection AR 176, 5.75 linear ft, donated by his widow Margaret J. Kennard (1968) and Caltech Millikan Library (1975). "Kennard's early career at Cornell is not well documented in this collection." Items that may bear on the unipolar work:
  • Box 10 Folder 3: "Reprints of Articles by EHK 1912-1928" (should hold the 1912, 1913 and 1917 unipolar papers and the Phys. Zeits. replies)
  • Box 4 Folder 4: "Lecture Notes on Electricity and Magnetism (1926)", Cornell Course 220. These may show how Kennard taught unipolar induction and the aether after relativity was accepted.
  • Box 4 Folder 5: manuscript "Note on the Nature of Physical Tensors"
  • Box 1 Folder 1: general correspondence 1927, 1948-1966
  • Access needs an approved application (https://aip.libwizard.com/f/ItemRequest). Not requested (no forms submitted).
  • Related, found elsewhere: Kennard was a co-author of the National Research Council report "Electrodynamics of Moving Media" (Swann, Tate, Bateman, Kennard; Washington, NRC Bulletin, 1922, 172 pp) [web] HathiTrust record (see hathitrust note). He also wrote "The Quantum Mechanics of Simple Types of Motion", Z. Phys. 44, 326 (1927) [web] Springer snippet, which is the origin of the Kennard uncertainty relation [memory, high].

Bearing

Priority 1 and 4. This is the main archival lead on the inventor. It is also the obvious record for whether Kennard kept or dropped the aether interpretation after 1917: his 1922 NRC chapter and 1926 lecture notes.