Scientist-Inventor

Harold Mallette Dean

The figure represents physicist Albert Abraham Michelson (1852-1931), inventor of the interferometer (which he's holding) and the first American winner of a Nobel Prize in science. Michelson was born in Prussia but wound up in California as a young boy and was raised first in the gold rush town of Murphy's Camp and went to high school in San Francisco. The light switch is cleverly used as the doorway of the observatory at Mt. Wilson in Pasadena, where Michelson performed experiments with an astronomical interferometer to measure the diameter of distant stars.