Thomas Eugene Everhart
American academic
Thomas Eugene Everhart FREng (born February 15, 1932, in Kansas City, Missouri) is an American university president, educator, and physicist. His area of expertise is the physics of electron beams. Together with Richard F. M. Thornley he designed the Everhart–Thornley detector. These detectors are still in use in scanning electron microscopes, even though the first such detector was made available as early as 1956.
Everhart was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1978 for contributions to the electron optics of the scanning electron microscope and to its use in electronics and biology. He was appointed an International Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 1990. He served as chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1984 to 1987 and as the president of the California Institute of Technology from 1987 to 1997.
Early life and education
Everhart's parents were William E. Everhart and Elizabeth A. West. Everhart received his A.B. in physics from Harvard University in 1953, and his M.S. in applied physics from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1955. He held a Marshall Scholarship at Clare College, Cambridge, where he completed a PhD in physics under Professor Charles Oatley in 1958.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Thomas Eugene Everhart” is american academic. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Thomas, Eugene and Everhart, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “american academic” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3525096. VIAF identifies the subject as 272733251. The Library of Congress control number is n81109198. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1932, 1956, 1978 and 1990.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
- Search vocabulary
- Locating named sources
The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Thomas Eugene Everhart”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Thomas Eugene Everhart primary sources, Thomas Eugene Everhart archive and Thomas research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Thomas Eugene Everhart”?
- Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
- What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Thomas Eugene Everhart” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.