He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on September 21, 1926, the son of William J. Glaser, a businessman, and his wife Lena. He received his early education in the public schools of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and took his B.Sc. degree in physics and mathematics at the Case Institute of Technology in 1946. His first original research is described in his bachelor's thesis and consists of an electron diffraction study of the properties of thin metallic films evaporated onto crystalline metal substrates.

After serving as a teacher of mathematics at the Case Institute of Technology during the spring of 1946, he began his graduate study at the California Institute of Technology in the autumn of the same year, finishing his Ph.D. work in the autumn of 1949, and receiving his degree in physics and mathematics officially in 1950. His doctoral thesis research was an experimental study of the momentum spectrum of high energy cosmic ray and mesons at sea level.

Glaser began his career of full-time teaching and research in the Physics Department of the University of Michigan in the autumn of 1949, being promoted to the rank of Professor in 1957. In 1959 he became Professor of Physics at the University of California, at Berkeley. His main research interest during this period was the elementary particles of physics, particularly the strange particles. He examined various experimental techniques that seemed useful in this research and constructed a number of diffusion cloud chambers and parallel-plate spark counters before finally beginning to develop the ideas that led to the invention of the bubble chamber in 1952. Since then he has worked on the development of various types of bubble chambers for experiments in high energy nuclear physics, besides carrying out experiments on elementary particles at the Cosmotron of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York and the Bevatron of the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in California. These experiments gave information on the lifetimes, decay modes, and spins of the L° hyperon, K° meson and S° hyperon as well as differential cross-sections for the production of those particles by pions.

Other experiments yielded information on pion-proton scattering, parity violation in non-leptonic hyperon decay, and the branching ratios in positive K meson decay.

All these experiments and technical developments of the past six years were carried out in collaboration with a number of his thesis students and colleagues at the University of Michigan and the University of California at Berkeley, where he worked from 1959. Among his associates in research were J. Brown, H. Bryant, R. Burnstein, J. Cronin, C. Graves, R. Hartung, J. Kadyk, D. Meyer, M. Perl, D. Rahm, B. Roe, L. Roellig, D. Sinclair, G. Trilling, J. van der Velde, J. van Putten and T. Zipf.

These researches were supported originally by the University of Michigan and later by the National Science Foundation of the United States and the United States Atomic Energy Commission.

Glaser has received many honours for his work, among which can be mentioned the Henry Russell Award of the University of Michigan, 1953, for distinction and promise in teaching and research; the Charles Vernon Boys Prize of the Physical Society, London, in 1958, for distinction in experimental physics; the American Physical Society Prize (sponsored by the Hughes Aircraft Company) for his contributions to experimental physics in 1959; and the award, in the same year, of the honorary degree of Doctor of Science by the Case Institute of Technology.

1960, the year in which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics, also saw Professor Glaser's marriage to Miss Ruth Bonnie Thompson.

From Nobel Lectures, Physics 1942-1962.