a member of the Democratic Party. Education In Princeton, Smyth attended Miss Fine's School, which later became the Princeton Day School, and the Lawrenceville School. After graduating from Lawrenceville in 1914, he entered Princeton University, where he received a classical education and graduated first in his class in 1918. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi. Smyth remained at Princeton to do graduate work; he and Allen Shenstone were the only graduate students in the Department of Physics. Smyth earned a master's degree and PhD in physics from Princeton in 1920 and 1921, respectively, studying under Karl Taylor Compton. The U.S. National Research Council awarded Smyth a fellowship, and he joined the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. There he studied under Ernest Rutherford and earned a second PhD in 1923. At Cambridge he was affiliated with Caius College and formed a friendship with Pyotr Kapitsa, a Soviet physicist who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics and work briefly on the Soviet atomic bomb project. Early career During World War I, Smyth worked in the Chemical Warfare Service, and at the Aberdeen Proving Ground. After earning his second PhD, he returned to Princeton for the last year of his NRC fellowship. During his early years on the Princeton faculty he lived in the Graduate College west of the main campus. He was appointed an instructor in 1924, an assistant professor in 1925, an associate professor in 1929, and a full professor in 1936. In 1935 he became chairman of the Department of Physics, a position he held until 1949. During 1931–32 he was a Guggenheim Fellow at the University of Göttingen, where he studied the spectra of triatomic molecules, particularly carbon dioxide, with James Franck. Smyth's early research was in spectroscopy, focusing on ionization of gases by impact with electrons as a means to study the gases' critical energy levels. He published his first research article, on the radiating potentials of nitrogen gas, in 1919; this became the basis of his first dissertation. In a 1922 article, he described a method for determining the ionization energy of a molecule using anode rays and demonstrated the method on mercury vapor. In the following year he used this same method to study nitrogen. He also published on the ionization of hydrogen, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, nitrogen dioxide, water vapor, sulfur dioxide, and carbon disulfide.