coming to the United States he was associate manager of the London Office. He was widely known in educational and industrial circles as an authority on the use and history of the microscope.
Alfred Nelson Finn
ALFRED NELSON FINN, Chief of the Glass Section of the National Bureau of Standards, Washington, D. C., died at the home of his brother in Lincoln, Nebraska, on September 21, 1942. Because of continued serious illness he had withdrawn from active work about one year earlier.
Mr. Finn was born in Denver, Colorado, on August 10, 1882. He attended the University of Denver where he received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and mathematics in 1909. He was Instructor in Chemistry at that university until 1911 when he received an appointment to the National Bureau of Standards.
As chemist in the Structural Materials Laboratory of the Bureau, Mr. Finn tested and analyzed cement, paints, oils, varnishes, coated metals, non-ferrous alloys, boiler waters, boiler compounds, and protective coatings for metals. He resigned from the National Bureau of Standards in 1919 to become Chief Chemist and Metallurgist for the Hydraulic Steel Company, Cleveland, Ohio. In 1920, he returned to the Bureau to assume the position he held until the time of his death.
At the beginning of the first World War this country had no satisfactory domestic source of optical glass. The resulting difficulty in producing military optical instruments focused attention upon the desirability of having a government-controlled source of supply for optical glass, and it was during Mr. Finn’s tenure of office that the Glass Section of the National Bureau of Standards was expanded into a glass plant of sufficient capacity to produce an important part of the optical glass required to meet present war needs. Mr. Finn and his associates made the seventy-inch glass disk for the telescope mirror now in use at Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, Ohio. The annealing and cooling required more than eight months, and at the time of its production (1927-28) this disk was the largest that had been produced in this country and the second largest for the entire world. Although interested in all phases of glass technology, Mr. Finn was particularly active in improving the quality of optical glass. In this work he made a careful study of annealing procedures and of tests for freedom from strain. Under his direction, important fundamental research was done on the properties of glass; many of his later papers dealing with the relations between density, index of refraction, dispersion, and chemical composition of optical glasses. A complete list of his publications will be found in The Bulletin of the American Ceramic Society.[1]
Mr. Finn was a member of the Optical Society of America, Washington Academy of Sciences, American Chemical Society, American Ceramic Society, American Society for Testing Materials, and American Institute of Chemists.
Orrin W. Pineo
ORRIN W. PINEO, physicist, died September 5, 1942, at his home in Milo, Maine. He was born at Katahden Iron Works, Maine, on September 28, 1908. He graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a S.B. degree in 1929. From 1929 to 1933 he worked with Professor A. C. Hardy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the development of an automatic recording visual range spectrophotometer which was later commercialized by the General Electric Company. During 1932-33 he held the Textile Foundation’s senior fellowship. From 1933 to 1934 he worked independently on the development of automatic spectrophotometers with Adam Hilger, Ltd.,in London and contributed to a book published by this company on the subject of “The Practice of Absorption Spectrophotometry.”
From 1935 to 1940 he was employed by the Calco Chemical Division, American Cyanamid Company, at Bound Brook, New Jersey, where he did further work on the development of spectrophotometers, taking out many patents and publishing a paper on ‘‘Residual photometric errors in the commercial recording spectrophotometer.”
During the last two years Mr. Pineo was engaged in work for the war effort, being located in Washington, D. C., and Princeton, New Jersey.
He was a member of the following scientific organizations: American Association for the Advancement of Science, Optical Society of America, American Association of Textile Colorists and Chemists,and the Society of Dyers and Colorists.
Harry John McNicholas
HARRY JOHN McNICHOLAS was born in 1892. He was graduated from Ripon College in 1915 with an A.B. degree. He came to the National Bureau of Standards in 1916, entering the Colorimetry Section under Irwin G. Priest. He remained in that Section until 1926, getting his M.A. degree in 1925 and his Ph.D. degree in 1926, both from Johns Hopkins University. Since 1926 he has been a member of the Photometry Section and of the pH Standards Section at the Bureau, being in this latter Section at the time of his death on July 23, 1942.
Dr. McNicholas was the author of a series of important research papers in the optical field, all published in the Bureau of Standards Journal of Research since 1928. Although he was perhaps best known for his development of the concept of apparent reflectance,[2] which is basic to present practice in the measurement of gloss and color of surfaces, Dr. McNicholas has also contributed importantly to visual and photographic spectrophotometry (RP30, RP33, and RP704), to choice of the colors of signal lights (RP956), to basic data on vegetable pigments and oils (RP337, RP815), and to the use of the diffraction method for the grading of wool and other fibers. Dr. McNicholas’ work was marked throughout by care in the design of equipment, by painstaking treatment of data, and by penetrating analysis thereof.
