Michelson was born in Strelno, Posen, Kingdom of Prussia (modern-day Strzelno, Poland), to Jewish parents, the son of Samuel Michelson and his wife, Rozalia Przyłubska. He moved to the US with his parents in 1855, at the age

Early measurements
Michelson was fascinated by light all his life. Once asked why he studied light, he said, ‘’because it’s so much fun.’’
As early as 1869, while serving as an officer in the United States Navy, Michelson started

In Season 3 Episode 26 of the television series Bonanza ("Look to the Stars", broadcast March 18, 1962), Ben Cartwright (Lorne Greene) helps the 16-year-old Michelson (portrayed by 25-year-old Douglas Lambert (1936–1986)) obtain an appointment to the

• 1888 – Rumford Prize
• 1903 – Matteucci Medal
• 1907 – Copley Medal
• 1907 – Nobel Prize in Physics
• 1912 – Elliott Cresson Medal

In 1877 Michelson married Margaret Hemingway, daughter of a wealthy New York stockbroker and lawyer and the niece of his commander William T. Sampson. They had two sons and a daughter.
In 1899, he married Edna Stanton. They raised three daughters.

Optical
In 1920 Michelson and Francis G. Pease made the first measurement of the diameter of a star other

In the 1890s Michelson built a mechanical device called the harmonic analyzer, for computing coefficients of Fourier series and drawing graphs of their partial sums. He and S. W. Stratton published a paper about this machine in the American Journal of Science in