Theodore Henry Geballe (January 20, 1920 – October 23, 2021) was an American physicist who was a professor of applied physics at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

. He was known for his work on the synthesis of novel materials of interest to several areas of physics and many interdisciplinary sciences.

Biography

Theodore Geballe was born and brought up in a Jewish family in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

, the son of Alice (Glaser) and Oscar Geballe.Theodore Geballe obituary
/ref> His grandfather left the

Province of Posen The Province of Posen (german: Provinz Posen, pl, Prowincja Poznańska) was a province of the Kingdom of Prussia from 1848 to 1920. Posen was established in 1848 following the Greater Poland Uprising as a successor to the Grand Duchy of Posen, w ...

Prussia Prussia, , Old Prussian: ''Prūsa'' or ''Prūsija'' was a German state on the southeast coast of the Baltic Sea. It formed the German Empire under Prussian rule when it united the German states in 1871. It was ''de facto'' dissolved by an em ...

to move to the United States in about 1870. He attended the

Galileo High School , motto_translation = And yet it moves , type = Public High school , established = , faculty = , district = San Francisco Unified School District , grades ...

in San Francisco, graduating in 1937. Geballe then travelled across

San Francisco Bay San Francisco Bay is a large tidal estuary in the U.S. state of California, and gives its name to the San Francisco Bay Area. It is dominated by the big cities of San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland. San Francisco Bay drains water from a ...

to attend college at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

. While still an undergraduate student at Berkeley, Geballe worked in

William Giauque William Francis Giauque (;''The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia'', 2004. May 12, 1895 – March 28, 1982) was a Canadian-born American chemist and Nobel laureate recognized in 1949 for his studies in the properties of matter at temperatures clo ...

's lab to accurately measure the

specific heat In thermodynamics, the specific heat capacity (symbol ) of a substance is the heat capacity of a sample of the substance divided by the mass of the sample, also sometimes referred to as massic heat capacity. Informally, it is the amount of heat t ...

gold Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au (from la, aurum) and atomic number 79. This makes it one of the higher atomic number elements that occur naturally. It is a bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile met ...

. In 1941, Geballe was called to active duty as an Army Ordnance Officer during the

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

. Geballe served in Australia, New Guinea and the Philippines and was responsible for maintaining guns. After the war, Geballe returned to Berkeley as a graduate student of Giauque, receiving his PhD in chemistry in 1949 - the same year that Giauque won the

Nobel Prize in Chemistry ) , image = Nobel Prize.png , alt = A golden medallion with an embossed image of a bearded man facing left in profile. To the left of the man is the text "ALFR•" then "NOBEL", and on the right, the text (smaller) "NAT•" then "M ...

. In 1952, he moved to

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...

in Murray Hill, New Jersey. While at Bell labs, he worked on studying transport properties in semiconductors at very low temperatures, and also on studying properties of unconventional superconductors. In 1967, Geballe joined

as a professor in the newly founded Department of Applied Physics as well as the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Geballe was involved in research in the then-upcoming field of multilayered heterostructure materials. Geballe served as the head of the Department of Applied Physics at Stanford from 1975 to 1977, and was the director of the Center for Materials Research from 1978 to 1988. In January 2020, Geballe's 100th birthday was marked by a celebratory conference.

Awards and honors

Geballe, along with

Bernd Matthias Bernd Theodor Matthias (June 8, 1918 – October 27, 1980) was a German-born American physicist credited with discoveries of hundreds of elements and alloys with superconducting properties. He was said to have discovered more elements and compoun ...

won the 1970

Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize The Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize is an annual award given by the American Physical Society "to recognize and encourage outstanding theoretical or experimental contributions to condensed matter physics." It was endowed by AT&T Bell Lab ...

awarded by the

American Physical Society The American Physical Society (APS) is a not-for-profit membership organization of professionals in physics and related disciplines, comprising nearly fifty divisions, sections, and other units. Its mission is the advancement and diffusion of k ...

"for experiments that challenged theoretical understanding and opened up the technology of high-field superconductors." Geballe also won the 1991 von Hippel award by the Materials Research Society, and was made a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1973. In 1989, he received the

Bernd T. Matthias Prize The Bernd Theodor Matthias Prize is a science award for innovative contributions to the material aspects of superconductivity. Summary Bernd Theodor Matthias Prize is presented since 1989 by the Bell Labs, created by friends and colleagues of prof. ...

. In 2000, the new Laboratory for Advanced Materials at Stanford was named "The Theodore H. Geballe Laboratory for Advanced Materials" in his honor.

Personal life

Geballe was married to Frances Koshland (1921–2019), daughter of Daniel E. Koshland Sr. and granddaughter of Abraham Haas. They have six children: Gordon Theodore Geballe, Alison Frances Geballe, Adam Phillip Geballe, Monica Ruth Geballe, Jennifer Corinne Geballe and Ernest Henry Geballe. He has 16 grandchildren and 10 great grandchildren. He died at his home in

Woodside, California Woodside is a small incorporated town in San Mateo County, California, United States, on the San Francisco Peninsula. Woodside is among the wealthiest communities in the United States, home to many technology billionaires and investment manager ...

, on October 23, 2021, at the age of 101.

References

External links

Theodore H. Geballe Papers
{{DEFAULTSORT:Geballe, Theodore H. 1920 births 2021 deaths 21st-century American physicists American centenarians American expatriates in Australia American expatriates in Papua New Guinea American expatriates in the Philippines Fellows of the American Physical Society Haas family Jewish American scientists American people of German-Jewish descent Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Men centenarians Military personnel from California Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize winners People from San Francisco Stanford University faculty United States Army officers United States Army personnel of World War II University of California, Berkeley alumni