February 24 is the birthday of noted Austrian born physicist and humanitarian, Dr. Karl Ferdinand Herzfeld (1892-1978), who was also an esteemed professor at The Catholic University of America (CUA) in Washington, D.C. from 1936-1968. Having arrived in the United States in 1926 to teach at Johns Hopkins University, Herzfeld was not a refugee from the Nazis, but his later presence at CUA helped set the stage for it to be a welcoming refuge for many German and Austrian scientists and scholars, some of whom we have chronicled in this blog, including Lise Meitner and Rudolph Allers.

Herzfeld was born in Vienna, Austria, and received his primary education from the Benedictines and earned his doctorate at the University of Vienna in 1914 after studying with Einstein at Zurich. During the First World War, he served as a First Lieutenant of Artillery in the army of Austria-Hungary and fought on the Italian and Russian fronts. After the war he returned to academics as a Privatdozent (junior faculty) and Assistant Professor at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, 1920-1926. As mentioned above, he came to the United States in 1926, first to John Hopkins and then to CUA, where he met his future wife, then Regina Flannery, who was studying anthropology under the renowned John Montgomery Cooper before going on to her own distinguished career as an anthropologist. After a brief courtship, the two were married by Msgr. Cooper on June 9, 1938.

In the Second World War, Herzfeld was a consultant to the Naval Ordnance Laboratory to improve artillery shells, and after the war he created and chaired the Mine Advisory Committee, which studied the scientific issues of mine warfare for the Chief of Naval Research. Although he did weapons research for the U.S. Navy, as a devout Roman Catholic influenced by ‘Just War Theory’, he declined to do atomic bomb research, believing it immoral as such weapons would not discriminate between civilians and combatants. Herzfeld served as chair of the Physics Department at CUA, 1936-1961, and was named Professor Emeritus in 1969, remaining active thereafter as a scholar and teacher. During his long career, he won international recognition for significant contributions physics and physical chemistry.

Through his fourteen books and well over a hundred scholarly journal articles, written in both German and English, he advanced the fields of ultrasonics, liquids and gases, chemical kinetics, and interior ballistics. His achievements were recognized with many awards, including the Mendel Medal of Villanova University (1931), the Sechi Medal of Georgetown University (1938), and the Cardinal Gibbons Medal of the Catholic University (1960). He was also recognized with a certificate of exceptional service by the Secretary of War and the Navy for his wartime service. In 1960 he was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences and on his 80th birthday, Catholic University struck a medal in his name to be awarded for outstanding contributions in the field of science. For more on Herzfeld, see the finding aid for his papers in Special Collections of email us at lib-archives@cua.edu

(1) Special thanks to Alexis Howlett for images.

(2) See also CUA College of Engineering, Physics, and Computing website on Herzfeld