Page 43 - Fall 2008

Passings
Dick Stern
Applied Research Laboratory, The Pennsylvania State University PO Box 30, State College, Pennsylvania 16804
Robert Thomas Beyer
1920 • 2008
More than seventy
years after a doctor fore-
cast his imminent demise,
Robert T. Beyer, Ph.D.,
belatedly died this week at
his home in Providence,
RI. He was 88. Professor
Beyer was an internation-
ally respected scientist
whose passion for such
things as history, language
and literature prompted a
colleague to call him “a
man for all seasons.” The
Hazard Professor of
Physics Emeritus at
Brown University, he was also an author, translator, CIA opera- tive, raconteur, world traveler, and medical miracle, whose wide range of interests, talents and activities defy easy description.
A gentle person of great learning and great humor, he was equally at home making light conversation with the King of Spain (who he met and joked with at a scientific conference in Madrid) or the attendant at the nearby drycleaner, and treated both in the same manner. “My father taught me to respect everyone and fear no one,” said his son Rick
Much of his life was set against a backdrop of serious illness. After he contracted rheumatic fever for the third or fourth time at age 16, the doctor told his family he had less than a year to live. Beyer survived another seven decades, outliving the doctor (and quite possibly the doctor’s children) by many years. His ill- ness left him with a much-weakened heart. When he became engaged to Hofstra classmate Ellen Fletcher in 1943, her father bluntly informed her “He’ll die on you, El.” “I don’t care, Daddy,” she responded, “I love him.” The pair married on Valentine’s Day 1944. His files contain numerous love poems he wrote her, and they remained devoted to each other for more than 60 years until Mrs. Beyer’s death in 2005
In 1948 Dr. Beyer was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. That led to a spate of other serious medical problems that he approached with an unfailingly positive attitude. When Mrs. Beyer would say that her husband “enjoyed bad health” she meant it literally. He treated his potentially life-threatening
medical emergencies as a source of amusing anec- dotes. During a 1958 trip to Glens Falls, New York, he was hospitalized because of a kidney stone. He drew a picture of the stone on a postcard and mailed it back to his col- leagues at Brown with this brief message: “Have stone, can’t travel.”
Robert Beyer was born in Harrisburg, PA, in 1920, the son of James Matthew Beyer and Mary
A. Gibney. His mother died a few weeks after his birth, and Dr. Beyer was raised in Baldwin, New York, by his aunt, Kate Beyer. After her sister Anna died in 1922, Kate married Anna’s hus- band, Charles Zubrod. The result was a set of family connec- tions so complex that those involved long since gave up trying to explain them. Mr. Zubrod made and lost a fortune on Wall Street, so after a brief period of great wealth, Robert spent most of his childhood in a family of very modest means.
His illness prevented him from attending classes during most of his high school years, but he excelled nonetheless. He went on to graduate first in his class from Hofstra College with an A.B. mathematics in 1942, and earned a Ph.D. in physics from Cornell in 1944. His thesis was so top secret that one of his advisers—Dutch Nobel Prize winner Peter Debye–didn’t have the security clearance required to review it. “Approved but not read,” was his terse comment.
As a desperately poor graduate student at Cornell, Beyer lost more than 25 pounds because he didn’t have the money for food. He was enticed to come to one lecture by Swiss-born physicist Henri Sack because the notice said there would be doughnuts served. The subject was acoustics, the study of sound, and so it was donuts that drew him into what would become his chosen field. His specialty was ultrasonics. “If you can’t hear it, I study it,” he liked to say.
Professor Beyer was hired by Brown in 1944 and taught there until his retirement in 1985. He was chairman of the
Acoustics Today welcomes contributions for “Passings.” Submissions of about 250 words that may be edited in MSWord or plain text files should be e-mailed to AcousticsToday@aip.org. Photography may be informal, but must be at least 300 dpi. Please send the text and photography in separate files.
42 Acoustics Today, October 2008