[4][5][6] An early interest in electromagnetism was stimulated by a toy motor but "destimulated" by high school and college physics courses.
With S. L. Quimby as his doctoral advisor, he wrote a dissertation on the effect of magnetization on the elastic properties of iron.
Naval Ordnance Laboratory, where he headed a team that was working on methods to protect ships against magnetic mines.
[6] From 1946 to 1955, Brown worked in Newton Square, Pennsylvania as a research physicist at the Sun Oil Company, investigating dielectric and ferromagnetic phenomena.
In 1955 he moved to Minnesota and worked with the 3M Company as a senior research physicist, where there was a strong interest in ferromagnetic single-domain particles.
He was strongly influenced by the 1935 paper of Lev Landau and Evgeny Lifshitz, which developed a one-dimensional continuous model for domain wall motion.
In 1938 W. C. Elmore published a paper that discussed a three-dimensional generalization of the Landau-Lifshitz theory, but did not attempt to derive the equations.