Charles Phelps Smyth

Charles Phelps "Charlie" Smyth February 10, 1895 – March 18, 1990) was an American chemist. He was educated at Princeton University and Harvard University. From 1920 to 1963 he was a faculty member in the Princeton Department of Chemistry, and from 1963 to 1970 he was a consultant to the Office of Naval Research. He was awarded the Nichols Medal by the New York Section of the American Chemical Society in 1954.

During World War I he worked in the National Bureau of Standards and the Chemical Warfare Service, and during World War II he worked on the Manhattan Project and Operation Alsos. He was awarded the Medal of Freedom in 1947 for the last.

Biography Smyth was born February 10, 1895, in Clinton, New York, and Charles Henry Smyth Jr., a professor of geology at Hamilton College. Woodrow Wilson, then President of Princeton University, convinced Smyth pére to join the faculty at Princeton, and in 1905 the family moved to Princeton, New Jersey.

Charles Phelps Smyth and his younger brother, Henry DeWolf Smyth, attended the same primary and secondary schools. The younger brother also received undergraduate and master's degrees from Princeton, but in physics, and became a Princeton faculty member like Charles Phelps Smyth and their father. Both brothers served in the Chemical Warfare Service in World War I and on the Manhattan Project.

In 1955 he married Emily Ellen Vezin. and the Lawrenceville School. He then entered Princeton as an undergraduate, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa as a junior. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree summa cum laude in 1916 and remained at Princeton to obtain a Master of Arts degree in 1917. After the war, in 1921, he received a Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard. Theodore William Richards advised him in his dissertation on thallium amalgam. He published two books and over 300 research articles. He was an associate editor of the Journal of Chemical Physics during 1933–36 and 1952–54.

The New York Section of the American Chemical Society awarded Smyth the William H. Nichols Medal in 1954. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1932 and the National Academy of Sciences in 1955. He was a fellow of the American Physical Society (elected 1937) and a member of the American Chemical Society and the Royal Society of Chemistry.

World War II Smyth joined the U.S. Navy Reserve in 1937 and was commissioned as a lieutenant commander. He resigned in 1941. and a Professor Osenberg. Smyth was awarded the Medal of Freedom for his work with Alsos. The sitting and to date only Charles Phelps Smyth Professor of Chemistry is Herschel Rabitz.