Ramberg, E. G., (Edward Granville), 1907-
Biographical notes:
A physicist and social activist, Edward Granville Ramberg was born in Florence, Italy, on June 14, 1907, to an American mother and German. Lucy (Dodd), an artist, and Walter, a philologist, surrounded their children Walter, Edward, and Lucy with art and culture, raising them in a rare cosmopolitan atmosphere in which they spoke French, German, Italian, and English. But Edward's life changed abruptly at seven, when his father was killed while serving with the German army.
After moving to Munich for the duration of the war, the Rambergs returned to Lucy's family home in Portland, Oregon, in 1920, graduating from Lincoln High two years later. An excellent student with a marked ability in quantitative sciences, Ramberg's collegiate career was neverthless marked by several interruptions. Although he enrolled at Reed College in 1922, he transferred to Cornell two years later, taking a hiatus from 1925-1927 to work in optical computation at Bausch and Lomb Optical Company. He decided to remain at Cornell after receiving his bachelor's degree in 1928 to work with F. K. Richtmyer, with whom he continued to collaborate throughout the 1930s.
In 1930, Ramberg went to Germany to sharpen his skills, receiving a doctorate under Arnold Sommerfeld at the University of Munich for "Doppelsprünge im Röntgenspektrum: Die Deutung Der Satelliten K α 3, 4" (1932). Although he returned to Cornell in 1932, continuing work on the theory of x-ray satellites and line widths, Ramberg soon moved to industry, joining RCA laboratories in Camden, New Jersey in 1935. As a junior engineer, he took part in both experimental and theoretical work on secondary emission, pickup tubes, and field emission, and later played a significant role in the development of the theory of thermoelectric refrigeration and image tube aberrations and in demonstrating the mathematical operability of a multistage electrostatic electron multiplier. Perhaps most famously, Ramberg, an expert in electron optics, took part in two particularly prominent projects: the development of color television in the late 1930s, and the construction of one of the first electron microscopes in the mid-1940s. He remained at RCA until 1972, when he retired with twenty-five patents to his credit.
Outside of RCA, Ramberg was a visiting professor in physics at the University of Munich in 1949 and was a Fulbright lecturer at the Technischehochschule in Darmstadt, Germany in 1960-1961. In 1964, he was awarded the David Sarnoff Outstanding Team Award in Science from RCA, and the David Sarnoff Award (co-sponsored by RCA and the IEEE) in 1972 for his work on electron optics, electron physics, and television. In addition to awards connected to RCA, Ramberg was made a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1957, and received the Karl Ferdinand Braun Prize from the Society for Information Display in 1989. Ramberg was a member of the Electron Microscope Society of America, the American Association of Physics Teachers, the Society of Sigma XI, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was made a Fellow of the Institute of Radio Engineers and the American Physical Society. He and Richtmyer received a research grant from the American Philosophical Society in 1935.
Although not a highly prolific author, Ramberg published five books during his career, four in collaboration with colleagues at RCA. He teamed with Viktor Zworykin. George Morton, and two other colleagues on an important early work in electron microscopy, Electron Optics and the Electron Microscope (N.Y., 1945), and he and Zworykin paired up again on Photoelectricity and its Application (1949) and Television in Science and Industry (1958). His final book was, written with A. M. Morell and H. B. Law, Color Television Picture Tubes, appeared in 1974. Ramberg also translated Arnold Sommerfeld's book Electrodynamics: Lectures on Theoretical Physics, vol. 3 (1952).
Building on the bitter early experience of losing his father in World War I, Ramberg became a committed pacifist and, after 1938, a devout member of the Society of Friends. With the outbreak of the Second World War, the federal government called upon Ramberg to continue work he had done on the metal structure of the electron microscope in order to make stronger shell casings, but he refused to participate. Claiming conscientious objector status, he refused all participation in the military and was assigned to Civilian Public Service. From 1943 to 1946, he was employed as an aide at a psychiatric facility in New Hampshire, in draining land in Maryland, and at Haskins Laboratory in New York City, where he worked on electronic aids for the blind. After his return to RCA in 1946, Ramberg devoted himself even more fervently to social reform and peace concerns. He was a founding member of the Society for Social Responsibility in Science (SSRS) in 1948, holding several positions with the organization through the years, including serving as president from 1958-1960. Still conscientiously abstaining from work on any project that contributed to warfare, he and his fellow members of the SSRS actively supported fellow conscientious scientists.
Ramberg married Sarah Sargent Ramberg on December 26, 1936. A graduate of Swarthmore College, Sarah had been working with the American Friends Service Committee when the couple met and broadly shared her husband's utopian values. She was deeply involved in the SSRS and was the editor of its Newsletter, and both she and her husband remained active in their Friends Meeting and in organizations such as Amnesty International. The Rambergs were one of thirteen families that founded Bryn Gweled in Upper Southampton Township, Bucks County, Pa., in 1941, a community designed to have equal positions for all of its members, regardless of race or gender. In a 1983 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Ramberg, still living at Bryn Gweled, was quoted as saying that they wanted "to have a place where families could bring their children and could live together in a group, a varied group, where they would learn there was more than one type of person in the world, more than one religion, more than one ethnic group and more than one economic group." He added, "I think that it has worked out... I think the basic idea of a cooperative has worked pretty well."
An untiring activist, Ramberg and his wife worked as draft counselors from 1968 to 1972 and traveled regularly to Washington, D.C., to protest the Vietnam War. For two years they took care of a foster daughter from Vietnam who was receiving medical treatments for phosphorous burns. During the 1970s, Ramberg worked at the Philadelphia Airport teaching minorities how to be qualified for positions as maintenance workers, and was deeply involved with the Friends Peace Committee of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, the Peace and Service Committee and the Committee on the United Nations of the Bucks Quarterly Meeting, and other Quaker organizations. He was one of the founding members of the Bucks County Group of Amnesty International in 1975. Politically, he was a Socialist from his days in college until 1972, when he and his wife became disenchanted with the party.
Sarah Ramberg died in May 1975 after a two year struggle with cancer. Edward Ramberg died on January 9, 1995.
From the guide to the Edward G. Ramberg Papers, 1916-1994, (American Philosophical Society)
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