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Douglas R. Tate ’35

Douglas R. Tate ’35, January 5, 2004, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Douglas graduated from Reed with a BA in physics. He began his career with the National Bureau of Standards (NBS; National Institute of Standards and Technology) as a cement inspector for the Grand Coulee Dam. In 1937 he transferred to Washington, D.C., as an assistant physicist on the staff of the Engineering Mechanics Section. In 1961 he was awarded a patent for "transducer systems for converting mechanical force into an electrical analog." The last years of his career with NBS were devoted to a determination of an acceleration due to gravity, part of an international effort to ascertain more precise values than those then available to the scientific community. For the successful completion of this project, Tate was awarded a silver medal by the Department of Commerce. Survivors include his wife, Elizabeth Lamb Tate ’39, who supplied the details for this memorial.

Appeared in Reed magazine: August 2004