Willard Frank Libby

Willard Frank Libby (1908-1980), American chemist and Nobel laureate, who developed the carbon-14 dating method. Libby was born in Grand Valley, Colorado, and educated at the University of California at Berkeley. With the outbreak of World War II, he became engaged in research on the atom bomb project. From 1945 to 1954 he was a professor of chemistry at the University of Chicago as well as a staff member of the Institute of Nuclear Studies. For the next five years Libby was a member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), but he returned to teaching in 1959 when he became a professor of chemistry at the University of California at Los Angeles. He was a member of the general advisory committee of the AEC from 1960 until 1962, when he became director of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics.

Libby is best known for having perfected, in 1947, the carbon-14 dating technique (see Dating Methods), a method of determining the approximate age of prehistoric organic remains. For this work Libby was awarded the 1960 Nobel Prize in chemistry. His work also included the study of the heavy-hydrogen isotope tritium.