Glaser was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on September 21, 1926. After graduation from high school in Cleveland Heights, Glaser attended the Case Institute of Technology, where he earned a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics in 1946. Three years later he was awarded a Ph.D. in the same subjects by the California Institute of Technology. His first teaching assignment was at the University of Michigan, where he later became professor of physics in 1957. In 1959 he assumed a similar position at the University of California at Berkeley. Glaser received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1960 for his invention of the bubble chamber. The idea for the invention occurred to him in 1949 while carrying out research on the new "strange particles" that had recently been discovered in cosmic ray interactions. The most common device then available for photographing these particles was the cloud chamber . A cloud chamber contains a vapor that has...