Oral history interview with Dorothy Walcott Weeks, 1978 July 19.

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Oral history interview with Dorothy Walcott Weeks, 1978 July 19.

Family background, education, and emergence of scientific orientation. Undergraduate years at Wellesley College, 1912-1916; description of physics department. Assistant examiner in U.S. Patent Office during World War I. At MIT under Edwin B. Wilson as graduate student and laboratory assistant, lab instructor, 1920-1924. Returned to MIT for doctoral work in 1928. Mathematical physics thesis under Norbert Wiener, while teaching at Wellesley. Depression years brought teaching position at Wilson College, 1930-1943; used Wellesley as model. Work on Zeeman Pattern earns her Guggenheim Fellowship at MIT and European labs, 1949-1950. World War II years as head of Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD British Report Section). Return to Wilson, 1945-1956, working part-time at National Science Foundation, 1953-1956. Retirement years, including affiliation with U.S. Army and spectroscopic work at Harvard College Observatory. Comments on women in physics in U.S., her own opportunities and teaching in general. Also prominently mentioned are: Pauline Morrow Austin, Louisa Eyre, George Harrison, Louise McDowell, Ethelbert D. Warfield, Edwin Bidwell Wilson; American Association of University Professors, American Physical Society, Jordan Marsh Co., Massachusetts Institute of Technology Spectroscopy Laboratory, Radcliffe College, State University of New York at Binghamton, United States National Bureau of Standards, United States Office of Scientific Research and Development, and United States Ordnance Materials Research Office.

Transcript, 23 pp.

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SNAC Resource ID: 8237508

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