Adolph Lomb

When Perley Nutting sought out the Rochester optics community to help found his fledgling professional society devoted to optics, Adolph Lomb of Bausch + Lomb quickly agreed to help. An eager collaborator, Lomb was elected treasurer of the Rochester Association for the Advancement of Applied Optics in 1915. He was elected to the same position for OSA in 1916 and would remain in that office for the next 16 years despite initial restrictions to one-term appointments.

Shy by nature, Lomb worked tirelessly behind the scenes and was essential to OSA’s growth and stability. He not only eagerly gave his time, but he also liberally donated his money. He believed in the value of philanthropy and practiced it through his patronage of OSA as a whole, as well as of individual members and projects. As OSA treasurer, Lomb knew first-hand the dire straits of the society through the 1920s, so he would quietly make up the deficit with his own money. In 1917, he donated over US$1,000 to OSA in addition to paying his own dues—a sum of money equal to the annual salary of most professors at the time.[Meyer, 2013]

During the 1920s, OSA’s annual deficit continued, and Lomb donated somewhere between US$2,000 and US$3,000 each year. Quite simply, the society would have become insolvent without Lomb. His beneficence extended to other projects, including the celebrated translation in 1924–1926 of von Helmholtz’s Physiological Optics, which Lomb personally bankrolled after the costs exceeded the original estimate of US$10,000.

Lomb regularly made significant contributions to OSA in addition to his other philanthropic activities. His patronage remained consistent during the economic devastation of the Great Depression. His backing was so vital to the organization that OSA formally acknowledged his influence in October 1923 by recognizing him as its patron. By the 1940s, three organizations would come to be designated as patrons of OSA, but Lomb was the only individual ever to hold that title. Even as he lay dying, he signed a check for OSA with the help of his younger brother Henry.

From the training received from his father in applied optics to his studies in Germany, Lomb was ever a student of the field. One of his most prized possessions was a collection of more than 1,400 optics books, which he and his brother gathered from the time they were young.

To honor Adolph, who died suddenly in 1932, Henry donated their collection to the University of Virginia, the alma mater of Adolph’s good friend Southall. The library was officially presented to the physics library during the 1933–1934 academic session.

Adolph Lomb died on 30 September 1932, in Rochester, N.Y., USA.