U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

PUBLICATIONS

Biographical Memoirs Lyman James Briggs

Published

Author(s)

P B. Myers, Johanna Levelt Sengers

Abstract

This is a biographical memoir of Dr. Lyman Briggs written for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Briggs began his career in 1896 as a soil physicist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He was transferred to NBS in 1917, where he invented and developed a variety of instrumentation related to navigation and aeronautics. He was appointed by President Roosevelt as the third Director of NBS in 1932. He steered NBS through the second World War, directing top-secret work on isotope separation that led to the Manhattan project, and many other war-related projects. After his retirement in 1945, he returned to research and did spectacular work on trajectories of spinning baseballs, as well as on fluids under negative pressure, publishing until he was well into his eighties.
Citation
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Volume
77
Pub Type
Journals

Keywords

aerodynamics, baseball trajectories, liquids under tension, National Geographic, soil science, stratospheric ballonss, uranium committee

Citation

Myers, P. and Levelt, J. (1999), Biographical Memoirs Lyman James Briggs, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (Accessed July 27, 2024)

Issues

If you have any questions about this publication or are having problems accessing it, please contact reflib@nist.gov.

Created August 31, 1999, Updated February 17, 2017