Francis Bitter - Career at MIT

Career At MIT

Bitter joined the Department of Mining and Metallurgy as an associate professor in 1934. (The department is now known as Materials Science and Engineering.)

While at MIT, he developed the Bitter electromagnet which was/is the most powerful electromagnet design. He established a magnet laboratory in 1938, where he built a solenoid magnet that produced a constant field of 100,000 gauss (10 teslas).

He also did work in the first characterization of the Zeeman effect with George Harrison.

During the Second World War, Bitter worked for the Naval Bureau of Ordinance. He often traveled to England to work finding out ways to demagnetize British ships to protect them from a new type of German mine. This new type of German mine used a compass needle to detonate itself. The mine, dropped from the air, would sink to the bottom of the river and sit there with its magnetic needle aligned to the Earth's magnetic field at that particular spot. When a British ship passed by over it, the mass of the ship caused the magnetic needle inside the mine to move slightly. The movement was enough to detonate the mine and cause an underwater explosion powerful enough to send up huge geysers. These geysers would literally lift a ship out of the water and severely damage the ship's infrastructure. In his autobiography "Magnets, The Education Of A Physicist", he referred to this unique work as "Degaussing the fleet". (It is possible that he worked with Francis Crick, who was researching the same problem.)

After the War, Bitter returned to MIT and joined the faculty of the physics department. He became a full professor in 1951, and from 1956 to 1960, he served as the associate dean of MIT's school of science. From 1962 to 1965, Bitter was the housemaster of Ashdown House, MIT's graduate dormitory.