Volume 2, Issue 9
Berkeley's Scientific Legacy
William Wallace Campbell (1862-1938), astronomer and administrator
In 1915, William Wallace Campbell was elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Astronomers remember William Wallace Campbell for his pioneering use of the spectrograph to measure the velocity of stars in the line of sight and for his strong leadership as Director of the Lick Observatory. In University of California history, Campbell is more widely known as a strong and compassionate president, whose administration from 1923 to 1930 was characterized by a steady growth and rising enrollment that continued even when the on-set of the Depression foreshadowed a curtailment of physical development on the campus.
Campbell graduated from the University of Michigan in 1886 with a degree in engineering. While he was a student at Michigan he worked as an assistant at the Observatory. That experience changed his life; he became fascinated by astronomy. Upon graduation, Campbell became a professor of mathematics at the University of Colorado. Two years later he was given the opportunity to return to the University of Michigan to teach astronomy -- but at half the salary he received at Colorado. It was an easy decision; he went to Michigan.
In 1890, Campbell spent the summer as a volunteer at the world-class Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton. There, under the tutelage of James E. Keeler, he studied the "New Astronomy," which we now know as astrophysics. Campbell was an apt student. When Keeler left Lick in 1891 to become Director of the Allegheny Observatory, Campbell was appointed to the Lick staff as Keeler's replacement. Seven years later, in 1890, Keeler returned to Mt. Hamilton as Director of the Observatory. In 1900, Keeler very suddenly and unexpectedly died. A group of the world's leading astronomers recommended that Campbell be Keeler's replacement.
Campbell in 1893 at the Lick Observatory
Over the next 30 years at Lick, Campbell encouraged and supported seminal spectrographic studies of a wide variety of astronomical objects. Frequently, the instruments used in the investigations were designed and fabricated on Mt. Hamilton. Campbell established an observing station in Chile to study stars in the southern hemisphere. He and his colleagues produced the most extensive and accurate catalog of radial velocities available then and for several decades thereafter. Campbell planned an expedition to Australia to observe the solar eclipse of 1922. The purpose of the observations was to test Einstein's theory that light passing near a massive object such as the Sun is bent by the gravitational field of the object. As an aside, in 2005 physicists worldwide are celebrating the centennial of Einstein's "miracle year" of publications, one of which predicted the light deflection. The eclipse observations, which were made and analyzed by Lick Astronomer R.J. Trumpler who later became a Professor of Astronomy at Berkeley, showed conclusively that light passing next to the edge of the Sun is bent by the amount Einstein predicted. Still, Campbell considered his greatest discovery to be that nearly one-third of the brighter stars are spectroscopic binaries; that is, systems in which two stars are so close together that they appear to be a single star, but which are shown spectroscopically to be two (or sometimes more) stars moving in orbits around their center of mass.
In 1922, Campbell accepted an invitation by the Regents to become President of the University. His scientific mindset guided his decisions as an administrator.
"The fundamental purpose of universities," he said in his inaugural address, "is to hasten the day when all men and all women shall have comprehension of the truth, so that they may live their lives more richly and more usefully in this exceedingly interesting world. The first... obligation of a university is to instruct the students who come knocking at its doors; to disseminate ... the knowledge that has been gained and preserved in all past time. The second great function of a modern university is to extend the frontiers of knowledge into regions as yet unexplored."
William Wallace Campbell died on June 14, 1938. Campbell Hall, named in his honor, houses UC Berkeley's Astronomy Department.