From Steam to Stars to the Early Universe

Abstract

Much of what follows was first published in Les Prix Nobel en 1983 (Fowler 1984). I have updated the autobiographical material to the summer of 1991. I was born in 1911 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of John MacLeod Fowler and Jennie Summers Watson Fowler. My parents had two other children, my younger brother, Arthur Watson Fowler and my still younger sister, Nelda Fowler Wood. My paternal grandfather, William Fowler, was a coal miner in Slammannan, near Falkirk, Scotland who emigrated to Pittsburgh to find work as a coal miner around 1880. My maternal grandfather, Alfred Watson, was a grocer. He emigrated to Pittsburgh, also around 1880, from Taniokey, near Clare in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. His parents taught in the National School, the local grammar school for children, in Taniokey, for sixty years. The family lived in the central part of the school building; my great grandfather taught the boys in one wing of the building and my great grandmother taught the girls in the other wing. The school is still there and I have been to see it. I have also visited Slammannan.