Campbell, William Wallace

Campbell, William Wallace

(1862–1938) astronomer; born in Hancock County, Ohio. Author of The Elements of Practical Astronomy (1899), he deduced that the Martian atmosphere could not support life (1894). He worked at California's Lick Observatory (1890–1923), becoming its director in 1901. Working with the Mills spectrograph he measured stellar radial velocities and published them (with Joseph Moore) in a catalogue (1928). He presided over the University of California: Mt. Hamilton (1923–30) and the National Academy of Sciences (1931–35).

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Campbell, William Wallace

 

Born Apr. 11, 1862, in Hancock, Ohio; died June 14, 1938, in San Francisco. American astronomer.

Campbell was in charge of the Lick Observatory in California from 1901 to 1930. His studies were devoted to astronomical spectroscopy (the calculation of the radial velocities of stars, spectral investigations of the atmosphere of Mars). He also conducted observations of the sun during eclipses. Campbell calculated the velocities and direction of the motion of the sun in space from the radial velocities of stars (1911).

WORKS

Stellar Motions, 2nd printing. New Haven-London, 1947.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.