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Death notice
Yardley Beers
12 April 1913 - 01 October 2005
Boston, MA
NIST - National Institute of Standards and Technology
Submitted by Benjamin Bederson
Published on 29 November 2005
Current comments and reminiscences on Yardley Beers:
Yardley Beers, former Professor of Physics at New York University and former Chief of the Radio Standard Physics Division at the Boulder NBS died on October 1, 2005, after a long illness following a stroke.
Yardley was born in Philadelphia April 2, 1913 to Louis G. Beers and Sarah McKim Yarldey Beers. He developed a fascination with electricity and electronics at a very early age, building a crystal radio receiver when he was nine years old. He had a life-long involvement with ham radio and was well-known throughout that amateur radio community. He wrote many articles for radio journals on circuits and antennae he designed.
Yardley attended the Phillips Academy and then majored in physics at Yale University. He received his Ph.D from Princeton University under the supervision of Rudolf Ladenburg, showing that beta rays and electrons were identical. He then obtained a staff position at MIT. Yardley was a key member of the Receiver Components Group of Division 6 of the Radiation Laboratory. It was as distinguished a group of physicists turned engineers as one could imagine. Yardley did his work therein effectively and quietly, just as his later papers on antennas (Yagis) proved. He was skilled in how to make things work. Thus, he and Willie Higgenbotham provided formidable practical support for the Receiver Group. He also contributed to the Radiation Laboratory series, Volume 23. .There, along with Arthur Roberts and Al G. Hill, he used the radar technology developed at the Radiation Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) during World War II to measure directly the ground state hyperfine transition frequency in gas phase cesium. This was the precursor of the entire field of gas phase magnetic resonance spectroscopy leading to atomic frequency standards and atomic clocks. The signals in this experiment were so weak that the work appeared only in an RLE internal publication and in a contributed paper at an APS meeting, but never in archival form.
After leaving MIT Yardley moved to the University Heights campus of New York University, where he established an active laboratory in the study of molecular spectroscopy using microwave techniques . He made significant contributions to the detection of extremely weak microwave transitions in gaseous molecules, which he later exploited in the study of molecular signals from space. One by-product of his laboratory activities was the authorship of the book Introduction to the Theory of Error , Addison-Wesley 1957, a book which became a standard in the measurement field for many decades and went through many editions .In 1961 Dr. Beers joined the laboratory of the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) in Boulder, CO, and shortly after his arrival was appointed Chief of the Radio Standards Physics Division, with responsibility for the development and operation of the national atomic frequency standard, the time and frequency broadcast services, and nascent programs in millimeter waves, plasma physics and lasers. It was a period of change in timekeeping. The international definition of the second was in flux, finally settling on the "atomic second" in 1967; the third generation cesium beam frequency standard was under development; and all the NBS time and frequency broadcast services within the continental United States were being consolidated in a new radio station at Fort Collins, CO. In 1968 Dr. Beers returned to research, in millimeter wave spectroscopy, with the objective of identifying molecules present in the upper atmosphere by their millimeter wave spectra. In 1979 he retired to pursue his interests in archeology, music, and teaching physics.
His extracurricular activities and interests ranged widely. He participated in an archaeological excavation on the Isle of Man in the United Kingdom. As a result he developed a great interest in British historical archaeology, which culminated in his Magna Cum Laude graduation from the University of Colorado with a BA degree in British history. In addition to being the oldest member of his graduating class, he was the recipient of a Jacob Van Eck prize for student excellence. He quipped that his professors and fellow student appreciated his ability to give first-hand accounts of events in American history.
Yardley was a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the IEEE; he was also active in Sigma Xi and the Explorer s Club.
Yardley, a unique combination of scientist and humanist, is survived by his wife of sixty years, Dorothy Sands Beers, two children Deborah Yardley Beers-Jones and Jerome Beers, two grandchildren and three step-grandchildren.
Robert Kamper (NIST)
Benjamin Bederson (NYU)
Britton Chance (U. of Penn)