Professor Richard Collins Lord, a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Raman Spectroscopy at its inception, died on 29 April 1989 at his home in Milton, Massachusetts. Professor Lord was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1910, graduated from Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio in 1931, and received a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from The Johns Hopkins University in 1936. After a postdoctoral year at the University of Michigan and another one with Professor Langseth in Copenhagen, he began his academic career at the The Johns Hopkins University in 1938. In 1942 he served as a technical aide and later as deputy chief of the National Defense Research Committee's optics division. His war work was concerned with some of the early efforts on guided missiles and early applications of infrared radiation. His academic career at M.I.T. began in 1946 as an Associate Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Spectroscopy Laboratory, where he rose to the rank of Full Professor in 1954. At this institution, he supervised the doctoral work of 47 students, as well as 11 M.S. degrees. In 1948, in collaboration with Drs Harrison and Loofbourow, he published Practical Spectroscopy,
which is a rather unique book providing both experimental methods, as well as applications, throughout the region of optical spectroscopy. The book has a tremendous amount of practical advice, along with fundamental details, and I still utilize significant sections of it for my current spectroscopy course, even though it is out of print. Doc published 143 refereed journal articles, and a significant number of his publications dealt with deuterium compounds, hydrogen bonding, and inversion and pseudorotation in small ring molecules, as well as much of his relatively recent work on the spectra of molecules of biological interest. These latter studies included both the infrared and Raman spectra of such molecules.
One other major area of R. C. Lord's interests concerned spectral studies in the far infrared region (200 to 10 cm-'). Around 1962, in conjunction with Jarrell-Ash and others, he developed a large vacuum instrument, which was capable of obtaining, rather routinely, far infrared spectra to 20 cm-', on which the low frequency vibration of carbon suboxide was finally observed.