Robert Bacher (1905 - 2004)

Robert Bacher was born on August 31, 1905, in Loudonville, Ohio. In 1930, he earned his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Michigan. After graduate work at both the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he joined Hans Bethe at Cornell University.

In December 1940, Bacher joined the Radiation Laboratory at MIT, focusing on issues around incoming radar signals. In 1942, Bacher was approached by Robert Oppenheimer to join the Manhattan Project at its new laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. It was at Bacher's insistence that Los Alamos became a civilian rather than a military laboratory. While at Los Alamos, Bacher headed the project's P (Physics) Division, and later its G (Gadget) Division.

Bacher was part of the pit assembly team at an old farmhouse near the Alamogordo testing site. After watching the test, his reaction was merely "Well, it works."

After the war, Bacher became director of the Laboratory of Nuclear Studies at Cornell. In 1949, he left Cornell to become the head of the Division of Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy at Caltech. In 1962, he became Caltech's vice president and provost. He stepped down from the post of provost in 1970 and became a professor emeritus in 1976. He was also a charter commissioner on the Atomic Energy Commission until 1949. He continued to serve the US government as a member of President Eisenhower's Science Advisory Committee from 1953 through 1955, and again from 1957 through 1959. He died in 2004 at the age of 99 in Montecito, California.