Thomas Foxen Anderson

Born in Manitowoc on February 7, 1911, to Anton Oliver Anderson and Mabel Foxen, he spent his first twelve years in a house wired early for radio and electricity. His father, a Navy electrician off the USS Texas, organized the Oslo Power and Light Company to bring power to Manitowoc County farms and ran an appliance shop besides. Mother Mabel, a pianist trained at a Red Wing seminary, died of tuberculosis when Tom was nine. Brother Norman’s chronic mastoiditis pushed Anton to sell the Manitowoc holdings in 1923 and chase a healthier climate through Tampa, Amherst, Rockford, and Glendale.

The boy who had electrical toys on the lake learned cells under a compound microscope in a Rockford botany class. Caltech and an RCA fellowship put him on the first commercial electron microscopes. He photographed bacteriophages attaching to and bursting their hosts, invented critical-point drying—replacing water with liquid carbon dioxide through a miscible-liquid series so specimens did not collapse into pancakes—and at the Pasteur Institute made the textbook images of bacteria conjugating. Paris Match once ran a conjugation micrograph under the caption “Un Accouplement de Bacterie.” His first paper, with Don Yost and Folke Skoog in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in 1933, measured the free energy of formation of iodine monobromide.

Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1964, he died in the Fox Chase area of Philadelphia on August 11, 1991. Manitowoc’s claim is the childhood and the shop floor that taught him machines; the phage and conjugation pictures are the scientific rest.