Arthur F. Turner

1968 OSA President Arthur F. Turner was born in Detroit, Michigan, USA in 1906. He received a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Berlin in 1935. While studying in Germany, Turner’s collaboration with Marianus Czerny resulted in the Czerny-Turner mounting, a method that uses low cost plano diffraction gratings and simple spherical mirrors for spectroscopy applications.

When Turner returned to the U.S., he spent the next four years teaching and doing research at MIT. Here he teamed up with Hawley Cartwright to begin pioneering work in optical interference coatings. Turner devoted his career to advancing the field of optical coatings. When Turner left MIT for Bausch & Lomb he embarked on a 20-year journey that advanced the field of optical coatings from design to deposition. In time, Turner became head of Bausch & Lomb’s optical physics department. He did much research on the interaction of laser light and optical coatings. Turner left Bausch & Lomb in 1971 and became a professor at the University of Arizona’s Center for Optical Sciences.

Turner was awarded a Technical Oscar in 1959 for the Balcold projection mirror, a cold mirror that eliminated the threat of fire from motion picture projectors. He also received OSA’s Frederic Ives Medal. He was a Fellow of OSA, APS, and the British Physical Society.

Arthur F. Turner died in March 1996.