[1] He eventually completed his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1921 under Nobel laureate Albert Michelson and Henry Gale.
In 1926, Smythe was the first to propose ion-velocity spectrometers, which he eventually built with Josef Mattauch.
[3] Smythe taught at least six Nobel Prize laureates: Charles Townes, Donald Glaser, William Shockley, Carl Anderson, James Rainwater, and Edwin McMillan, who won the Chemistry prize.
His electromagnetism course was modeled after the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos examinations[7][8] and designed to "weed out weaklings.
"[4] Smythe's course was so infamous that future Nobel Prize in Economics laureate Vernon Smith switched to electrical engineering from physics to avoid it.