Archives at Cornell

P. Gerald Kruger letters

Collection — Box: 1

Identifier: 6536

Scope and content

Courtship letters from Jerry Kruger in Ithaca, N.Y. to Erica Wackenroder in Berlin. Also report book from the Friedrich-Willhelms Universitat; and biographical information, including We Flew With Our Own Wings: Memories, Letters and More, by his niece Nancy Kruger Olson, 2000.

Dates

1926-1931, 2002.

Creator

Kruger, P. Gerald (Peter Gerald), 1902- (Person)
Olson, Nancy Kruger. (Title of work: We flew with our own wings..) (Person)

Biographical / Historical

Physicist. Cornell University Ph.D. 1929. From 1926-1927, he received a German-American Exchange Fellowship to the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute in Berlin, where he studied with Max Planck and others. In 1929-1930, a second fellowship, from the National Research Council provided him with the opportunity to study at the Physikalische Technische Reichsanstalt. In 1931 he returned to Cornell as a Heckscher Research Fellow. He then went to the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne, where he taught for the rest of his career and supervised the construction of their cyclotron. While in Germany, he met Erika Wackenroder whom he married on August 27, 1931. Dr. Kruger died on November 4, 1978.