Webb describes working as a child with his father, who had studied in Gt̲tingen with Hermann von Helmholtz and was a consultant for the building of the Manhattan Bridge; his early education; his undergraduate education at Columbia College and further work with his father at Stevens Institute during his senior year; graduate work at Columbia University under Michael Pupin, Albert Wills, George Pegram, William Hallock, and Ernest F. Nichols; his assistantship to visiting professors Vilhelm F. K. Bjerknes, Hendrik A. Lorentz, and Otto Lummer; work with George Pegram on heat developed by thorium; Ph.D. work under Nichols; research at the Cavendish Laboratory where he heard lectures by John J. Thomson and Joseph Larmor, and at Berlin where he attended lectures by Max Planck and Walther Nernst; a brief account of the state of physics in the first decade of the 20th century; his World War I work in the Signal Corps in radio and arc cathodes; his return to Columbia University after the war, where he reorganized the Ernest Kempton Precision Laboratory and taught graduate courses; his early research in atomic physics; the growth of physics during the 1920s; activities as secretary of the American Physical Society (1923-1929 and 1939-1941); and his outside interests, marriage, and family