Abstract
SEBASTIAN JACOB MAUCHLY, physicist with the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism of the Carnegie Institution of Washington since 1914, died on Dec. 24, at his home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, after a long illness. Dr. Mauchly, who was fifty years of age, specialised in terrestrial electricity, and as chief of the Section of Terrestrial Electricity of the Department was responsible for the development and improvement of many instruments for observing the electric elements at field and observatory stations. He made numerous valuable contributions to this branch of science and was the first to direct attention to the apparent universal twenty-four hour term in the diurnal variation of the earth's electric field. This fundamental result was deduced by him largely from his discussions of the work at sea by the Carnegie, and he later corroborated this conclusion by extensive investigations of results at land stations over the entire globe. He was also chief of the solar eclipse expedition of the Carnegie Institution of Washington to Lakin, Kansas, in 1918, and co-author of Vol. 5 of Researches of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, 1926.
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DR. S. J. MAUCHLY. Nature 123, 215 (1929). https://doi.org/10.1038/123215a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/123215a0