Peter Irving Wold(Nov. 27, 1881-June 17, 1945). | |  |
Born in Norway, South Dakota, one of five children of Ivor Peterson Wold (a Norwegian immigrant) and Gurine Gimse Wold, Peter Wold was raised in Nebraska, where his father served as a missionary to the Santee tribe of the Sioux. Most of the boy's playmates were Native Americans, and the Wold family's good relations with the tribe were credited with dissuading it from joining the Ghost Dance unrest of 1889-90.
Nevertheless, clashes sometimes occurred, and the adult Peter Wold bore on his forehead the scar of an arrow wound incurred at the age of three. When the boy was fifteen, his father died and the family moved to Oregon. As a student at the University of Oregon, Wold began teaching even before graduating (BS 1901), serving as instructor in physics for three years from the start of his senior year. In 1903 he took an EE degree.
He then spent two years as a patent examiner with the U.S. Patent Office, before enrolling in the PhD program at Cornell University and accepting an instructorship there. After three years, his work at Cornell was interrupted for six years when he returned to the Patent Office as an examiner of patents in the field of radio telegraphy and telephony, 1908-10, and then, in 1910, accepted a position as professor of physics at the Tsing Hua College in Peking. In 1909 he married Mary Helen Helff.
One of eighteen Americans on the first faculty of Tsing Hua College, which had been established with the portion of the Boxer Indemnity Fund returned by the U.S. to the Chinese government, Wold was selected to head the physics department because the dean had been his student at Cornell.
Returning for a final year at Cornell on an Andrew Dickson White fellowship, Wold took a PhD in 1915 and then accepted what was intended to be a three month job with Bell Laboratories. Under the pressure of war work, it lasted five years.
President Richmond recruited Wold in 1920 to take charge of Union's physics department. He directed it for the next twenty-five years, a period of growth in both personnel and facilities, including the inauguration in 1922 of the special BS in Physics course, the 1926 addition to the physics building, and the renovation begun in 1945. He helped launch the summer institutes for teachers and the cooperative research program with the American Locomotive Co.
From 1940 he was chairman of the Science Division. Outside the College, Wold served as president of the Schenectady Council of the Boy Scouts of America (1931-35) and as an elder of the First Presbyterian Church. A specialist in the electrical properties of metals and vacuum tube phenomena, Wold frequently consulted for Bell labs during the summers, and he continued his own research in radio telegraphy and related fields, securing at least ten patents. In addition to technical papers, in 1937 he published a revised edition of AL. Kimball's A college text-book of physics.
Some of Wold's work had a broader scope. He patented a new method for measuring gravity in 1934, and two of his 1935 papers in the Physical Review attracted wide attention; he suggested there and elsewhere that the so-called "red shift" in light reflected by distant stars, which Einstein, LeMaitre, Jeans, and others had interpreted as evidence for an expanding universe, might instead be explained by the hypothesis that light slows over time, or as a result of passage through radiation. He failed to prove this bold theory experimentally, however, and it has been largely forgotten.
During the Second World War, Wold was frequently away from the College engaged in war-related work on radar. At Pearl Harbor from November 1940 until September 1941 he worked for U.S. Naval Ordnance; at MIT's Radiation Laboratory from January to November 1943, he served as technical aide to the Navy Liaison Officer; and again with Naval Ordnance in Washington for part of each week during the spring and early summer of 1944, he worked on means to prevent accidents in which the Allies shot down their own planes. The government would, in fact, have taken even more of Wold's time, but President Fox had to reject some requests because Wold was needed on the campus to direct the work of the physics department, which was heavily involved in the Navy V-12 program.
After Wold's death, MIT president Karl Compton wrote to Union that Wold's service in Hawaii, Cambridge and Washington had been "rendered at a critical time in the over-all planning of the American program for research and development in the field of radar and had considerable bearing on the further direction of this program."
Wold took a leave during the last term of 1944/45 to conduct research at Bell labs in New York City. While back on the campus in June 1945 to make final arrangements for the General Electric Science Fellows program, he succumbed to a heart attack.
The Wolds lived in the north faculty house in North College from 1926 until 1944, when they moved to McKean House. They had a daughter and two sons, both of whom attended Union (Ivor Peterson Wold '34 and John Schiller Wold, '38). John Wold has served as a trustee of the College since 1981; in 1988 he and his wife endowed a chair in geology.
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Source: The Encyclopedia of Union College History, Wayne Somers, ed (Union College Press, 2003), pp. 794-795.