Robert Brode, Cosmic Ray Pioneer, Dies

Physicist Robert Bigham Brode, a pioneer cosmic ray researcher and member of the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb during World War II, has died at the age of 85.

Brode, who died last Wednesday, retired from the University of California, Berkeley in 1967 but continued as an academic administrator in the university system.

At the outset of World War II, Brode was asked to lead a research team that developed the first proximity fuse for high explosive bombs and later headed a group that applied the concept to the triggers for the first atomic bombs.

Brode served briefly as director of the University of California’s Space Sciences Laboratory and later as director of the Berkeley campus’ academic program in London. A Rhodes scholar at Oxford, he also conducted research at Cambridge and Manchester universities in England.

Brode, a native of Walla Walla, Wash., received a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1924 and joined the Berkeley faculty three years later.

He is survived by his wife, Bernice Bidwell Brode, and a son, John, a computer scientist in Cambridge, Mass.