Abstract

When F. Dow Smith was elected to the OSA presidential sequence in 1973, he found that one of his duties as president-elect would be to serve as a traveling lecturer, visiting all the OSA local sections to give a talk. In preparing one of the lectures it occurred to him that he should contact some of the important old timers and ask them for their recollections of years past. One who responded was professor George Harrison of MIT, a well-known spectroscopist who had been a member of OSA since the early 1920s, had served as editor of JOSA for 10 years and had been OSA president in 1945-46. In 1973, Harrison was dean emeritus of the School of Science at MIT. Here are some of his reminiscences, with a few editorial comments in parentheses.

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