Albert Abraham Michelson

Albert Abraham Michelson was an American physicist known for his work on the measurement of the speed of light and especially for the MichelsonMorley experiment. In 1907 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics. He became the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in sciences.

Michelson was born in Strzelno, Province of Posen in Prussia into a Jewish family. He moved to the US with his parents in 1855, at the age of two. He grew up in the mining towns of Murphys Camp, California and Virginia City, Nevada, where his father was a merchant. His family was Jewish by birth but nonreligious, and Michelson himself was a lifelong agnostic. He spent his high school years in San Francisco in the home of his aunt, Henriette Levy , who was the mother of author Harriet Lane Levy.

Source: Wikipedia