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The Life and Scientific Contributions of Lyman J. Briggs

^a U.S. Geological Survey, 430 National Center, Reston, VA 20192
^b U.S. Geological Survey, Mail Stop 421, 345 Middlefield Road, Menlo Park, CA 94025

View larger version (13K): [in a new window]   Fig. 1. Diagram of an idealized unsaturated medium that Briggs used in explaining now-familiar concepts of soil-water flow (Briggs, 1897, p. 19). The circles represent spherical soil particles. Water adheres to all solid surfaces. Straight arrows indicate the direction and relative magnitude of capillary force on the air-water interface between particles. The curved arrows show the direction of water flow.

View larger version (122K): [in a new window]   Fig. 2. The centrifuge developed by Briggs and McLane (1907)(Plate I) for measuring moisture equivalents. Drive belts not shown here extended into the intensively engineered "engine room" nearby. The centrifuge rotor, or "head," in the lower picture contained eight sample cups with perforated bottoms.

View larger version (82K): [in a new window]   Fig. 3. Collage depicting apparatus for investigating the water requirement of plants (Briggs and Shantz, 1914, Plate II). (1) Lysimeters planted with sugar beets emerging through circular wax seals. (2) The weighing device and its crew of three, who could weigh lysimeters at the rate of 120 per hour. (3) Lysimeters used to study Colorado native plants, gumweed (left), and mountain sage.

View larger version (164K): [in a new window]   Fig. 4. Photo of Briggs in 1933 when he was appointed Director of the National Bureau of Standards.

View larger version (133K): [in a new window]   Fig. 5. Lyman Briggs at a 13 Sept. 1942 meeting in Bohemian Grove, CA of the S-1 Executive Committee which constituted the scientific leadership of the American atomic bomb project. Left to right: Harold Urey, Ernest Lawrence, James Conant, Briggs, Edgar Murphee, Arthur Compton. (Credit: Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives).

View larger version (42K): [in a new window]   Fig. 6. Briggs' (1950)(p. 721) measurements of the limiting negative pressure of water, as a function of temperature. These results show that liquid water can sustain negative pressures as extreme as 28 MPa (280 bars) and that the temperature dependence of this limiting pressure is anomalous, like many other properties of water, within a few degrees Celsius of the freezing point.