In 1946, two groups published landmark papers in the <i>Physical Review</i>.  E. M. Purcell, H. C. Torrey, and R. V. Pound’s “Resonance Absorption by Nuclear Magnetic Moments in a Solid,” submitted December 24, 1945, and F. Bloch, W. W. Hansen , and M. Packard’s “Nuclear Induction,” submitted on January 29, 1946.  In 1952, Felix Bloch (1905-1983) and Edward Mills Purcell (1912-1997) shared the 1952 Nobel Prize in Physics “for their development of new methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements and discoveries in connection therewith.”  This paper will give a short discussion of the lives and scientific accomplishments of Bloch and Purcell and how one discovery founded a field (nuclear magnetic resonance) widely used to study the molecular structure of pure materials, the composition of mixtures, reaction mechanisms, and the human body.

Purcell and Bloch: The discovery and early developments in NMR

2019 Spring National Meeting

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