Robert Meservey

Robert H. Meservey matriculated in 1939 at Dartmouth College, where he was a varsity athlete.[5] He joined the U.S. Army on April 6, 1943 but graduated from Dartmouth before going on active duty slightly later.

At Dartmouth, he was captain of the ski team and won the Eastern Slalom Championship during the winter of 1941-42. Upon graduating, he volunteered for the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division, serving as a corporal instructor in skiing, rock climbing and winter survival. Awarded the Soldier’s Medal for saving the lives of two soldiers during maneuvers in West Virginia, he was sent to Engineer Officer Candidate School (OCS) at Ft. Belvoir, Va. From 1944 to 1946, as an Army Engineer officer, second lieutenant, he volunteered for duty in the Pacific Theatre, delivering night vision equipment, but was assigned to developing heat-sensing equipment at the Engineer Research and Development Laboratory (ERDL) until discharged in 1946.[6]

After his discharge from the U.S. Army, he worked for several years as a highly successful, independent professorial photographer. He photographed several famous people, including Robert Frost, John F. Kennedy (JFK), and Jacqueline Bouvier, who married JFK in 1953. Meservey's best-known photograph is of Jacqueline Bouvier, descending the stairs at her debutant party in the summer of 1947. When JFK became the U.S. President, the photograph appeared on several magazine covers and also appeared in many later books.[6][7] Meservey other work included a series of photographs of Dartmouth College and fashion and architectural photography in New York City and Newport, Rhode Island. Several of his photographs were published in Antoinette Downing and Vincent Scully's prize-winning 1952 book Architectural Heritage of Newport Rhode Island: 1640–1915, published by Harvard University Press.[6][8] Downing and Scully's book contains reproductions of Meservey's photographs of Newport's historic Christopher Townsend House and Job Townsend House.[9]

From 1951 to 1955 Meservey was employed as a physicist at the U.S. Army's ERDL.[1] There he worked on the development, during the Korean War, of night vision equipment and also did graduate study in physics and mathematics at George Washington University. One of his physics professors was George Gamow.[6] In 1955 Meservey became a graduate student at Yale University, where he worked in the low temperature physics group directed by Cecil Taverner Lane (1904–1991).[6] Meservey continued his work on night vision equipment from 1955 to 1960 as a consultant for the Perkin Elmer Corporation, during his graduate study at Yale University.[1] With Lane as his thesis advisor, he received in 1961 his Ph.D with thesis entitled An Optical Study of the Dynamics of Liquid Helium.[10]

He worked from 1961 to 1963 at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.[1] There he co-authored, with David Douglass, an important paper on superconducting tunneling.[6][11][12] Meservey was a senior scientist at MIT's Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory from 1963 to 1994, when he retired.[2] His doctoral students include Jagadeesh Moodera and Paul Tedrow.[13]

... his most impactful work involved the experimental discovery that the current flowing in tunnel junctions could be separated into spin-up and spin-down parts. This discovery and subsequent experiments have led to a burgeoning field of study of spin effects in conductors and blossoming developments in electronic applications.
...
The discovery of electron spin-polarized tunneling in 1970 ... with ... Tedrow ... demonstrated that the quasipartical density of states in a superconductor was split in energy by a magnetic field, providing a way to obtain a pure tunnel current of either spin direction to probe the spin density of states of other metals near the Fermi energy. It allowed for the measurement of the degree of spin polarization of conduction electrons in ferromagnetic metals, study the effect of spin-orbit scattering in superconductors and the investigation of other theoretical predictions involving electron spin. This discovery since then known as the Meservey-Tedrow technique has been widely exploited worldwide.[2]

In 1995, Meservey, with Jagadeesh Moodera and other team members, discovered large magneto-resistance occurring at room temperature in ferromagnetic-ferromagnetic tunnel junctions. This breakthrough enabled the development of a new generation of "computers with extreme high density drives and nonvolatile magnetic memory/logic devices."[2][14]

Meservey was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society.[2] In 2009 he received, jointly with Terunobu Miyazaki, Jagadeesh Moodera, and Paul Tedrow, the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize for their "pioneering work in the field of spin-dependent tunneling and for the application of these phenomena to the field of magnetoelectronics."[15]

Robert was the younger son of Arthur Bond Meservey (1885–1952), who was the chair of Dartmouth College's department of physics, and Anne White Meservey (1886–1970). Robert H. Meservey had a sister, Ellen, and a brother, Edward.[16] Edward B. Meservey (1916–2009) also became a Darmouth alumnus, a ski champion,[17] and a physicist.[18] Edward's wife, Sabra Follett Meservey (1924–1994), was the first woman to formally enroll as a graduate student for a higher degree at Princeton University.[19] The couple met in Istanbul, where they both taught at a girls's school.[20] (She was Barbara Newhall Follett's sister.)[21]

On September 29, 1953 in Arlington, Virginia, Robert H. Meservey married Evelyn Bradford Miller (1931–2014). Upon his death he was survived his widow, their two married daughters, and four grandchildren.[6]