Walter P. White (1867 - 1946)

Walter Porter White was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts on February 23, 1867. He received his bachelor’s (1887) and master’s (1892) degrees from Amherst College before pursuing graduate studies at Harvard, MIT, the University of Wisconsin, and Cornell University between 1888 and 1904. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1904. The same year, he came to the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution as a staff physicist. White’s work focused upon calorimetry, optics, and precision measurement. He retired in 1935 and died on February 7, 1946.