Amateur Michelson

"Interested primarily in the aesthetic side of life," Scientist Albert Abraham Michelson, of the University of Chicago, last week held an exhibition of his paintings in Chicago. With his own hands Dr. Michelson adjusted against the wall 18 watercolors, twelve portraits in pen and ink. Said he, "Of all the oil portraits I made, I have destroyed every canvas."

The learned world knew versatile Dr. Michelson as the first man who ever computed the size of a star, as winner of the Nobel Prize in physics (1907), as the man who fixed the standard length of a metre bar in terms of the wave length of cadmiun light. It was he who helped devise the Michelson-Morley experiment in interference of light, with bearing on the Einstein theory. But the learned world did not know him as a former naval officer, nor as an excellent violinist, nor as a keen tennis player, nor as an amateur of literature and drama. A self-taught artist, Dr. Michelson had his only instruction in drawing as a midshipman at Annapolis.