George E. Valley Jr.

George Edward Valley Jr. (September 5, 1913 – October 16, 1999) was an American physicist who joined the MIT Radiation Laboratory in 1940, where he led the development of the H2X radar bombsight.

[2] After working for Bausch and Lomb Optical Co. for a short period of time, he enrolled as a graduate student in physics at the University of Rochester where he obtained his PhD under Prof. Lee A. DuBridge[3] in 1939; his thesis, titled “The Determination of the Energies of the Radiations from Artificial Radioactive Elements”, involved development and applications of the new Rochester cyclotron.

He built a thermal ionization, magnetic sector, mass spectrometer to compare the iron isotope ratios of Earth with other bodies in the Solar System.

[5] The field of Fe-isotope geochemistry, pioneered by Valley, lay dormant over 50 years, but has now blossomed with development of newer more-sensitive mass spectrometers.

Vacuum Tube Amplifiers edited by Valley and Wallman (1948) became the best seller of the series and was used as a textbook well into the 1960s despite the prevalence of transistor technology.

The threat of Soviet bombers coming across the north pole into the United States ended US complacency following World War II.

This work led directly to the creation of the MIT Experimental Study Group (ESG), an alternative learning option offered to all incoming freshmen[13][14] that is still going strong 50 years later.