Albert Abraham Michelson (December 19, 1852 - May 9, 1931) was an American physicist. He emigrated to the US from Germany with his family at the age of 2. President Grant awarded him a special appointment to the US Naval Academy. After graduating in 1873 and two years at sea, he returned to the Naval Academy to become an instructor in physics and chemistry. He conducted his first experiments of the speed of light, as part of a class demonstration in 1877. He resigned from the Navy in 1881, and became a professor of physics at the Case School of Applied Science. In 1887 he and Edward Morley carried out the Michelson-Morley experiment. Their experiment for the expected motion of the Earth relative to the aether, the hypothetical medium in which light was supposed to travel, resulted in a null result. In 1907, he had the honor of being the first American to receive a Nobel Prize in Physics "for his optical precision instruments and the spectroscopic and metrological investigations carried out with their aid". He died in 1931 at the age of 78.