Abstract

During the 17 years that Arthur Hardy served as OSA Secretary in the 1940s and 1950s, membership in the Society almost quadrupled, rising from 650 to more than 2,400. Prior to becoming Secretary, Hardy was Vice President of the Society from 1933-1935 and President from 1935-1937. For most of his career, he was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hardy pioneered the rapid automatic recording of absorption spectra. He was widely recognized for his invention of a recording spectrophotometer to measure refl ected and transmitted light. In 1957, Hardy was awarded the Frederick Ives Medal, the highest award of the Optical Society. Excerpted here are Hardy’s reminiscences from his Ives Lecture.

© 2007 Optical Society of America