Rolla Roy Ramsey (April 11, 1872 – June 11, 1955) was an American physicist, university professor, and radio electronics pioneer.
As a university teacher, Rolla took a special interest in "farm boys" who took physics courses; he observed that "they were not afraid to work".
The formal opening of Clark (as the first all-graduate-studies institution in the United States) was on October 2, 1899, with research-focused departments of Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Psychology.
Rolla Roy Ramsey, Arthur Lee Foley, Albert Fredrick Ottomar Germann, and Ross Franklin Lockridge, Sr. were among the alumni elected in 1911.
That year, in an Indiana University lecture on wireless transmission, he treated his audience to an opera transmitted from Pittsburgh by pioneer broadcasting station Westinghouse KDKA.
[7] Ramsey conducted a demonstration of “wireless telephony” for a group of 75 students and faculty in 1922; his experiments sparked the first calls for a radio station on the IU campus.
[8] In a 1927 demonstration, he sent a television image from a transmitter to a receiver at opposite ends of an Indiana University lecture hall.
Ramsey was head of the World War I laboratory-oriented radio electronics course at Indiana University.
The Army called again for his services in World War II when the government decided to train men in the fundamentals and use of radio.
After visiting College Park and finding the facilities there inadequate, Ramsey immediately recommended that the responsibility for training be given to universities.
[14] Ramsey was a pioneer in perfecting the ball-and-stick models[15][16] used by subsequent physics and chemistry students for many decades to represent the composition and the three-dimensional geometry of molecules.
He served as a reserve medical officer in the United States Army during World War II.