Lyman James Briggs was born on May 7, 1874, and died on March 25, 1963. He was an American engineer, physicist, and administrator. During the Great Depression, he served as the third director of the National Bureau of Standards (NBS). Before the United States entered the Second World War, he was chairman of the Uranium Committee. The Lyman Briggs College at Michigan State University is named in his honor.

Life and work

Briggs was born on a farm in Assyria, Michigan, near Battle Creek, Michigan. He was the oldest of two brothers in a family that came from Clement Briggs, who arrived in America in 1621 on the ship Fortune, which was the first ship to follow the Mayflower. He lived an outdoor life and had responsibilities typical of a busy farm in the late 1800s. He attended the Briggs School, which his grandfather built, and later taught there.

Briggs entered Michigan Agricultural College (now Michigan State University) in East Lansing, Michigan, at age 15 after passing an exam. The college was a Land Grant institution, meaning it taught subjects like agriculture and mechanical arts. He studied agriculture but later focused on mechanical engineering and physics. He earned a master’s degree in physics from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1895. He then went to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, to work on his PhD.

In 1896, Briggs married Katharine Cook, whom he met as an undergraduate at Michigan Agricultural College. Together, they had two children: a boy named Albert (called "Bertie") and a girl named Isabel. Albert died as an infant, and Isabel later married Clarence Myers and helped create the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator with her mother.

In 1896, Briggs also joined the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. While there, he continued his research at Johns Hopkins under Henry Augustus Rowland. He studied Roentgen Rays but completed his PhD in physics in 1903 with a dissertation titled On the absorption of water vapor and of certain salts in aqueous solution by quartz. That same year, he was elected to the Cosmos Club.

Briggs’ first professional job was managing the Physics Laboratory (later the Bureau of Soils) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He was part of a new group of scientists who studied plant biology and ecology. His research focused on how soil holds water, and he helped create the science of soil physics. In 1906, he developed a soil classification method called the moisture equivalent, which is now considered the first Pedotransfer function. That year, he also organized a biophysical laboratory that later became the Bureau of Plant Industry. He worked with Homer Leroy Shantz on how the environment affects how plants take in water and contributed early research to ecology.

In 1917, Briggs was assigned by an Executive Order to the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Standards due to World War I. There, he helped develop an artificial horizon device for naval vessels with John Hayford. The device allowed naval guns to be aimed accurately despite the movement of the ship. A secret report called the Hayford–Briggs report was shared with the Navy but never published.

In 1920, Briggs left the Department of Agriculture and joined the National Bureau of Standards, where he led the Engineering Physics Division (later the Mechanics and Sound Division). He hired Hugh L. Dryden to lead the Aerodynamics Physics Section, and together they studied how airfoils work near the speed of sound. Their research helped improve aircraft propeller designs.

Briggs also worked on navigational tools and invented the Heyl–Briggs earth inductor compass with Paul R. Heyl. The compass used a spinning electric coil to determine a plane’s direction relative to Earth’s magnetic field. For this invention, they received the Magellan Medal from the American Philosophical Society in 1922. This compass was used by Admiral Byrd during his flight to the North Pole and by Charles Lindbergh during his 1927 trans-Atlantic flight.

In 1926, Briggs was appointed assistant director for research and testing by National Bureau of Standards Director George Kimball Burgess. After Burgess died in 1932, President Herbert C. Hoover nominated Briggs to replace him, but Congress did not act on the nomination. When Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in 1933, he chose Briggs to lead the Bureau, saying, “I haven’t the slightest idea whether Briggs is a Republican or a Democrat; all I know is that he is the best qualified man for the job.”

Briggs took over the Bureau during the Great Depression. His first task was to cut costs by 50%. He saved jobs for about two-thirds of the staff by offering part-time work or transferring some to the American Standards Association. He focused on projects with direct economic benefits and used funds from the Works Progress Administration to hire unemployed mathematicians to create math tables. His persuasive skills helped Congress increase funding for the Bureau in 1935, and many employees were rehired.

In 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt asked Briggs, then 65, to lead the Advisory Committee on Uranium to study uranium fission after receiving the Einstein–Szilárd letter. Progress was slow, and the project was not focused solely on military uses. Scientists later described the work as slow-moving and difficult. At the time, Briggs was unwell and had to undergo surgery, which limited his ability to act quickly.

Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, German refugees Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, working with professor Marcus Oliphant, discovered that an atomic bomb could be made from a small amount of concentrated U-235. In June 1940, British progress reports were sent to Briggs in the U.S. by Ralph H. Fowler. In March 1941, a British committee of Nobel Prize-winning scientists, the MAUD Committee, concluded that an atomic bomb was “not only feasible, it was inevitable.” They also noted that Germany had a nuclear research lab in Berlin. A copy of their report was sent to Briggs because Britain lacked resources and wanted to move research to the U.S. The MAUD Committee later provided detailed technical information on building an atomic bomb in July 1941.

At the time, Britain was at war and wanted to prioritize developing an atomic bomb, fearing Germany might do so first. The U.S. was not yet at war, and many Americans were hesitant to get involved. Marcus Oliphant, a member of the MAUD Committee, traveled to the U.S. in an unheated bomber in late 1941 to urge the U.S. to act on the findings.

Awards, honors and distinctions

Honorary doctorates from the following institutions:

Briggs was awarded the following honors:

Served as president of the following organizations: