Ed Bair is a 3rd generation Coloradoan born in 1922. Summers spent with prospectors on his uncle’s gold mining properties formed a basis for independent minded iconoclasm. The area is a museum of geologic history from uplifted mountain peaks that expose eons of sedimentary layers to granite batholiths swept clean by ice flows. A contract to cut timber for a water diversion project in a rain forest at 10,500 feet financed his first year of college.
Chemistry at Colorado State University led to jobs that financed further education. They included analyzing limestone at a quarry in Wyoming, analyzing cattle blood for a university research project at a Wyoming size ranch where the vehicles navigated by compass, analyzing coke coal to make lime from limestone, and analyzing sugar refining at all stages from incoming beets to the pH that allows sugar to solidify as crystals instead of a glass. On enrolling for advanced ROTC in his junior year the Dean withheld his signature pending a “choice” between science and field artillery.
He arrived at the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge with a fresh B.S. in chemistry in time to help set up facilities that purified the 235U for the first atomic bomb. After World War II he received a Ph.D. from Brown University in 1949 under Professor Charles A. Kraus for a study of incipient micelle formation using electrolytic conductivity. He then accompanied Professor Paul C. Cross to the University of Washington for a post doctoral appointment to set up a molecular spectroscopy laboratory.
His independent academic career began at Indiana University in 1954 where he has remained except for brief excursions as a visiting scientist at the places such as the National Research Council, Ottawa, Cambridge University, England, and the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. He built a laboratory to study fast processes and energy distributions in the photochemistry of molecules such as ozone. These are the subject of much of his published work. He is now an emeritus professor.
Visits to most of the solar energy facilities in the U.S. as a solar power consultant led to his interest in the future of electric power and a realization that the magnitude of the problem is vastly underestimated.
