Signaling from the Moon

Arthur Rage (ENG 1925) invented the strain gauge, a fingernail-sized device that revolutionized the way things are weighed and tested for stress. Ruge, who understood the value of the deceptively simple device, went on to commercialize it for use in a wide range of civil, mechanical and aeronautical engineering applications.

His device helped the U.S. win World War II, and the first signal received from the moon was a reading from a strain gauge on the leg of the Surveyor I lunar lander in 1969.

The Arthur C. Ruge Atrium in Scott Hall was named by his daughter, Claire Ruge Bertucci, who along with her husband, John, funded the Bertuccia Nanotechnology Lab.

Arthur Ruge’s deceptively simple invention offered the world a way to weigh objects that did not depend on balancing the force exerted by the object being weighed against some other weight or force. 

Read Arthur Ruge’s The New York Time obituary