Victor Vacquier, Sr. (October 13, 1907 – January 11, 2009) was a professor of geophysics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. Vacquier was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 1920, Vacquier escaped the Russian Civil War with his family, taking a horse-drawn sleigh across the ice of the Gulf of Finland to Helsinki, then moving to France and (in 1923) to the United States. He received a B.S. in electrical engineering in 1927 from the University of Wisconsin, and a master's degree in physics in 1929, but never earned a Ph.D. He worked for , the research arm of Gulf Oil, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and then during World War II he moved to the at Columbia University, where he applied the fluxgate magnetometer, an instrument he had invented at G