Physical Society Colloquium

A brief history of the McGill Physics Department, 1889-1939

Jean Barrette

Physics Department
McGill University

The Department of Physics of McGill University has a long history. The Department of Physics was established in 1891 as a split from the Department of Natural Philosophy and Mathematics. The long tradition of research in physics at McGill goes back to the creation of the Department with people like Callendar, Rutherford and Barnes. This talk will include many examples of the type of research done in the Department up to the Second World War. The examples presented will include the work Callendar and Barnes did in 1899 to achieve the most precise measurement of the specific heat of water with thermometers sensitive to the ten-thousandth part of a degree, the results of Gray on the scattering of gamma rays that could be considered the first observation of the Compton effect. At that time there was a strong component of applied research. As an example of such research, I will present the work of Eves on the effect of smoke on the ionization of air, research clearly related to present day smoke detectors, and the work of Keys on the time evolution of explosion pressure using a homemade cathode-ray oscillograph. This talk is largely based on the history of the Physics Department that Professor Montague Cohen was writing at the time of his death in 2002.