Education and Early Career
Bitter entered the University of Chicago in 1919, but chose to leave his studies there in 1922 in order to visit Europe. He later transferred to Columbia University and graduated in 1925.
He continued his studies in Berlin from 1925 to 1926 and received a Ph.D. at Columbia in 1928. At Columbia, Bitter began his lifelong fascination with magnets.
Under a National Research Council fellowship, Bitter studied gases at Caltech with Robert Andrews Millikan, from 1928 to 1930. While at Caltech, he married Alice Coomara. She had been a moderately successful singer working under the stage name Ratan Devi.
In 1930, Bitter went to work for Westinghouse, where he worked on various theoretical and applied problems concerning ferromagnetism.
With a Guggenheim Fellowship, Bitter travelled to England in 1933 and worked at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University. There. he worked with Peter Kapitza on pulsed magnetic fields.
The following year, Bitter returned to America and his work at Westinghouse. Later in 1934, he joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and continued to consult for Westinghouse.
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