John Dalton

John Dalton FRS (6 September 1766 – 27 July 1844) was an English chemist, physicist,
and meteorologist. He is best known for his pioneering work in the development of modern
atomic theory; and his research into colour blindness, sometimes referred to as Daltonism, in
his honour. Dalton's early life was highly influenced by a prominent Eaglesfield Quaker named
Elihu Robinson, a competent meteorologist and instrument maker, who got him interested in
problems of mathematics and meteorology. During his years in Kendal, Dalton contributed
solutions of problems and questions on various subjects to The Ladies' Diary and the
Gentleman's Diary. In 1787 at age 21 he began to keep a meteorological diary in which, during
the succeeding 57 years, he entered more than 200,000 observations. He also rediscovered
George Hadley's theory of atmospheric circulation (now known as the Hadley cell) around this
time. Dalton's first publication was Meteorological Observations and Essays at age 27 in 1793,
which contained the seeds of several of his later discoveries. However, in spite of the originality
of his treatment, little attention was paid to them by other scholars. A second work by Dalton,
Elements of English Grammar, was published at age 35 in 1801.
 Humphry Davy

Sir Humphry Davy, 1st Baronet PRS MRIA FGS (17 December 1778 – 29 May 1829)
was a Cornish chemist and inventor, who is best remembered today for isolating a series of
substances for the first time: potassium and sodium in 1807 and calcium, strontium, barium,
magnesium and boron the following year, as well as discovering the elemental nature of
chlorine and iodine. He also studied the forces involved in these separations, inventing the new
field of electrochemistry. Berzelius called Davy's 1806 Bakerian Lecture On Some Chemical
Agencies of Electricity "one of the best memoirs which has ever enriched the theory of
chemistry." He was a Baronet, President of the Royal Society (PRS), Member of the Royal Irish
Academy (MRIA), and Fellow of the Geological Society (FGS). He also invented the Davy Lamp
and a very early form of incandescent light bulb.
 Michael Faraday

Michael Faraday FRS (/ˈfæ.rəˌdeɪ/; 22 September 1791 – 25 August 1867) was an

English scientist who contributed to the study of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. His
main discoveries include the principles underlying electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism and
electrolysis.
Although Faraday received little formal education, he was one of the most influential
scientists in history. It was by his research on the magnetic field around a conductor carrying a
direct current that Faraday established the basis for the concept of the electromagnetic field in
physics. Faraday also established that magnetism could affect rays of light and that there was
an underlying relationship between the two phenomena. He similarly discovered the principles
of electromagnetic induction and diamagnetism, and the laws of electrolysis. His inventions of
electromagnetic rotary devices formed the foundation of electric motor technology, and it was
largely due to his efforts that electricity became practical for use in technology.
As a chemist, Faraday discovered benzene, investigated the clathrate hydrate of
chlorine, invented an early form of the Bunsen burner and the system of oxidation numbers, and
popularised terminology such as "anode", "cathode", "electrode" and "ion". Faraday ultimately
became the first and foremost Fullerian Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution of Great
Britain, a lifetime position.
Faraday was an excellent experimentalist who conveyed his ideas in clear and simple
language; his mathematical abilities, however, did not extend as far as trigonometry and were
limited to the simplest algebra. James Clerk Maxwell took the work of Faraday and others and
summarized it in a set of equations which is accepted as the basis of all modern theories of
electromagnetic phenomena. On Faraday's uses of lines of force, Maxwell wrote that they show
Faraday "to have been in reality a mathematician of a very high order – one from whom the
mathematicians of the future may derive valuable and fertile methods." The SI unit of
capacitance is named in his honour: the farad.
 William Crookes

Sir William Crookes OM PRS (17 June 1832 – 4 April 1919) was an English chemist and
physicist who attended the Royal College of Chemistry, London, and worked on spectroscopy.
He was a pioneer of vacuum tubes, inventing the Crookes tube which was made in 1875.
Crookes was the inventor of the Crookes radiometer, which today is made and sold as a novelty
item. Late in life, he became interested in spiritualism, and became the president of the Society
for Psychical Research.
Crookes made a career of being a meteorologist and fierce lecture giver at multiple studies and
courses. Crookes worked in chemistry and physics. His experiments were notable for the
originality of their design. He executed them skillfully. His interests, ranging over pure and
applied science, economic and practical problems, and psychiatric research, made him a well-
known personality. He received many public and academic honors. Crookes's life was one of
unbroken scientific activity.
 Joseph John Thomson

Sir Joseph John Thomson OM PRS (/ˈtɒmsən/; 18 December 1856 – 30 August 1940)
was an English physicist. He was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of London and
appointed to the Cavendish Professorship of Experimental Physics at the Cambridge
University's Cavendish Laboratory in 1884.

In 1897, Thomson showed that cathode rays were composed of previously unknown
negatively charged particles, which he calculated must have bodies much smaller than atoms
and a very large value for their charge-to-mass ratio. Thus he is credited with the discovery and
identification of the electron; and with the discovery of the first subatomic particle. Thomson is
also credited with finding the first evidence for isotopes of a stable (non-radioactive) element in
1913, as part of his exploration into the composition of canal rays (positive ions). His
experiments to determine the nature of positively charged particles, with Francis William Aston,
were the first use of mass spectrometry and led to the development of the mass spectrograph.

Thomson was awarded the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the conduction
of electricity in gases. Seven of his students, including his son George Paget Thomson, also
became Nobel Prize winners either in physics or in chemistry. His record is comparable only to
that of the German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld.
 Robert A. Millikan

Robert Andrews Millikan (March 22, 1868 – December 19, 1953) was an American experimental
physicist honored with the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1923 for his measurement of the
elementary electronic charge and for his work on the photoelectric effect.

Millikan graduated from Oberlin College in 1891 and obtained his doctorate at Columbia
University in 1895. In 1896 he became an assistant at the University of Chicago, where he
became a full professor in 1910. In 1909 Millikan began a series of experiments to determine
the electric charge carried by a single electron. He began by measuring the course of charged
water droplets in an electric field. The results suggested that the charge on the droplets is a
multiple of the elementary electric charge, but the experiment was not accurate enough to be
convincing. He obtained more precise results in 1910 with his famous oil-drop experiment in
which he replaced water (which tended to evaporate too quickly) with oil.

In 1914 Millikan took up with similar skill the experimental verification of the equation introduced
by Albert Einstein in 1905 to describe the photoelectric effect. He used this same research to
obtain an accurate value of Planck’s constant. In 1921 Millikan left the University of Chicago to
become director of the Norman Bridge Laboratory of Physics at the California Institute of
Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California. There he undertook a major study of the
radiation that the physicist Victor Hess had detected coming from outer space. Millikan proved
that this radiation is indeed of extraterrestrial origin, and he named it "cosmic rays." As chairman
of the Executive Council of Caltech (the school's governing body at the time) from 1921 until his
retirement in 1945, Millikan helped to turn the school into one of the leading research institutions
in the United States. He also served on the board of trustees for Science Service, now known
as Society for Science & the Public, from 1921 to 1953.
 Eugen Goldstein

Eugen Goldstein (5 September 1850 – 25 December 1930) was a German physicist. He

was an early investigator of discharge tubes, the discoverer of anode rays, and is sometimes
credited witn the mid-nineteenth century, Julius Plücker investigated the light emitted in
discharge tubes (Crookes tubes) and the influence of magnetic fields on the glow. Later, in
1869, Johann Wilhelm Hittorf studied discharge tubes with energy rays extending from a
negative electrode, the cathode. These rays produced a fluorescence when they hit a tube's
glass walls, and when interrupted by a solid object they cast a shadow.

In the 1870s Goldstein undertook his own investigations of discharge tubes, and named
the light emissions studied by others Kathodenstrahlen, or cathode rays. He discovered several
important properties of cathode rays, which contributed to their later identification as the first
subatomic particle, the electron. He found that cathode rays were emitted perpendicularly from
a metal surface, and carried energy. He attempted to measure their velocity by the Doppler shift
of spectral lines in the glow emitted by Crookes tubes.

In 1886, he discovered that tubes with a perforated cathode also emit a glow at the
cathode end. Goldstein concluded that in addition to the already-known cathode rays, later
recognized as electrons moving from the negatively charged cathode toward the positively
charged anode, there is another ray that travels in the opposite direction. Because these latter
rays passed through the holes, or channels, in the cathode, Goldstein called them
Kanalstrahlen, or canal rays. They are composed of positive ions whose identity depends on the
residual gas inside the tube. It was another of Helmholtz's students, Wilhelm Wien, who later
conducted extensive studies of canal rays, and in time this work would become part of the basis
for mass spectrometry the discovery of the proton.
 Wilhelm Röntgen

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (/ˈrɛntɡən, -dʒən, ˈrʌnt-/;[1] German: [ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈʁœntɡən]; 27

March 1845 – 10 February 1923) was a German mechanical engineer and physicist, who, on 8
November 1895, produced and detected electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength range
known as X-rays or Röntgen rays, an achievement that earned him the first Nobel Prize in
Physics in 1901. In honour of his accomplishments, in 2004 the International Union of Pure and
Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) named element 111, roentgenium, a radioactive element with
multiple unstable isotopes, after him.
 Henri Becquerel

Antoine Henri Becquerel (15 December 1852 – 25 August 1908) was a French physicist,
Nobel laureate, and the first person to discover evidence of radioactivity. For work in this field
he, along with Marie Skłodowska-Curie and Pierre Curie, received the 1903 Nobel Prize in
Physics. The SI unit for radioactivity, the becquerel (Bq), is named after him. In 1892, he
became the third in his family to occupy the physics chair at the Muséum National d'Histoire
Naturelle. In 1894, he became chief engineer in the Department of Bridges and Highways.

Becquerel's earliest works centered on the subject of his doctoral thesis: the plane
polarization of light, with the phenomenon of phosphorescence and absorption of light by
crystals.

Becquerel's discovery of spontaneous radioactivity is a famous example of serendipity,

of how chance favors the prepared mind. Becquerel had long been interested in
phosphorescence, the emission of light of one color following a body's exposure to light of
another color. In early 1896, in the wave of excitement following Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen's
discovery of X-rays on January 5 that same year, Becquerel thought that phosphorescent
materials, such as some uranium salts, might emit penetrating X-ray-like radiation when
illuminated by bright sunlight. His first experiments appeared to show this.
 Marie Skłodowska Curie

Marie Skłodowska Curie (/ˈkjʊri, kjʊˈriː/;[2] French: [kyʁi]; Polish: [kʲiˈri]; 7 November
1867 – 4 July 1934), born Maria Salomea Skłodowska [ˈmarja salɔˈmɛa skwɔˈdɔfska], was a
Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on
radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person and only woman to
win twice, the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two different sciences, and was part of the
Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes. She was also the first woman to become a professor at
the University of Paris, and in 1995 became the first woman to be entombed on her own merits
in the Panthéon in Paris.
She was born in Warsaw, in what was then the Kingdom of Poland, part of the Russian
Empire. She studied at Warsaw's clandestine Floating University and began her practical
scientific training in Warsaw. In 1891, aged 24, she followed her older sister Bronisława to study
in Paris, where she earned her higher degrees and conducted her subsequent scientific work.
She shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband Pierre Curie and with physicist
Henri Becquerel. She won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Her achievements included the development of the theory of radioactivity (a term that
she coined), techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes, and the discovery of two elements,
polonium and radium. Under her direction, the world's first studies were conducted into the
treatment of neoplasms, using radioactive isotopes. She founded the Curie Institutes in Paris
and in Warsaw, which remain major centres of medical research today. During World War I, she
established the first military field radiological centres.
While a French citizen, Marie Skłodowska Curie (she used both surnames) never lost
her sense of Polish identity. She taught her daughters the Polish language and took them on
visits to Poland. She named the first chemical element that she discovered—polonium, which
she isolated in 1898—after her native country.
Curie died in 1934, aged 66, at a sanatorium in Sancellemoz (Haute-Savoie), France,
due to aplastic anemia brought on by exposure to radiation while carrying test tubes of radium in
her pockets during research, and in the course of her service in World War I mobile X-ray units
that she had set up.
 Pierre Curie

Pierre Curie (/ˈkjʊri, kjʊˈriː/;French: [kyʁi]; 15 May 1859 – 19 April 1906) was a French
physicist, a pioneer in crystallography, magnetism, piezoelectricity and radioactivity. In 1903 he
received the Nobel Prize in Physics with his wife, Marie Skłodowska-Curie, and Henri
Becquerel, "in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint
researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel".
 Ernest rutherford

Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson, OM, FRS (30 August 1871 – 19
October 1937) was a New Zealand physicist who came to be known as the father of nuclear
physics. Encyclopædia Britannica considers him to be the greatest experimentalist since
Michael Faraday (1791–1867).

In early work, Rutherford discovered the concept of radioactive half-life, proved that
radioactivity involved the nuclear transmutation of one chemical element to another, and also
differentiated and named alpha and beta radiation. This work was done at McGill University in
Canada. It is the basis for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry he was awarded in 1908 "for his
investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive
substances", for which he is the first Canadian and Oceanian Nobel laureate, and remains the
only laureate born in the South Island.

Rutherford moved in 1907 to the Victoria University of Manchester (today University of

Manchester) in the UK, where he and Thomas Royds proved that alpha radiation is helium
nuclei. Rutherford performed his most famous work after he became a Nobel laureate. In 1911,
although he could not prove that it was positive or negative, he theorized that atoms have their
charge concentrated in a very small nucleus, and thereby pioneered the Rutherford model of the
atom, through his discovery and interpretation of Rutherford scattering by the gold foil
experiment of Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden. He conducted research that led to the first
"splitting" of the atom in 1917 in a nuclear reaction between nitrogen and alpha particles, in
which he also discovered (and named) the proto
 James Chadwick

Sir James Chadwick, CH, FRS (20 October 1891 – 24 July 1974) was an English
physicist who was awarded the 1935 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the neutron in
1932. In 1941, he wrote the final draft of the MAUD Report, which inspired the U.S. government
to begin serious atomic bomb research efforts. He was the head of the British team that worked
on the Manhattan Project during the Second World War. He was knighted in England in 1945 for
his achievements in physics.

Chadwick graduated from the Victoria University of Manchester in 1911, where he

studied under Ernest Rutherford (known as the "father of nuclear physics"). At Manchester, he
continued to study under Rutherford until he was awarded his MSc in 1913. The same year,
Chadwick was awarded an 1851 Research Fellowship from the Royal Commission for the
Exhibition of 1851. He elected to study beta radiation under Hans Geiger in Berlin. Using
Geiger's recently developed Geiger counter, Chadwick was able to demonstrate that beta
radiation produced a continuous spectrum, and not discrete lines as had been thought. Still in
Germany when the First World War broke out in Europe, he spent the next four years in the
Ruhleben internment camp.

After the war, Chadwick followed Rutherford to the Cavendish Laboratory at the
University of Cambridge, where Chadwick earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree under
Rutherford's supervision from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in June 1921. He was
Rutherford's assistant director of research at the Cavendish Laboratory for over a decade at a
time when it was one of the world's foremost centres for the study of physics, attracting students
like John Cockcroft, Norman Feather, and Mark Oliphant. Chadwick followed his discovery of
the neutron by measuring its mass. He anticipated that neutrons would become a major weapon
in the fight against cancer. Chadwick left the Cavendish Laboratory in 1935 to become a
professor of physics at the University of Liverpool, where he overhauled an antiquated
laboratory and, by installing a cyclotron, made it an important centre for the study of nuclear
physics.
 Francis William Aston

Francis William Aston FRS (1 September 1877 – 20 November 1945) was an

English chemist and physicist who won the 1922 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery, by
means of his mass spectrograph, of isotopes, in a large number of non-radioactive elements,
and for his enunciation of the whole number rule. He was a fellow of the Royal Society and
Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
 Arthur Jeffrey Dempster

Arthur Jeffrey Dempster was a Canadian-American physicist best known for his work in
mass spectrometry and his discovery of the uranium isotope

Dempster was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He received

his bachelor'sand master's degrees at the University of Toronto in 1909 and 1910, respectively.
He travelled to study in Germany, and then left at the outset of World War I for the United
States; there he received his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Chicago.

In 1918, Dempster developed the first modern mass spectrometer, a scientific apparatus
allowing physicists to identify compounds by the mass of elements in a sample, and determine
the isotopic composition of elements in a sample. Dempster's mass spectrometer was over 100
times more accurate than previous versions, and established the basic theory and design of
mass spectrometers that is still used to this day. Dempster's research over his career centered
on the mass spectrometer and its applications leading in 1935 to his discovery of the uranium
isotope 235U. This isotope's ability to cause a rapidly expanding fission nuclear chain
reaction allowed the development of the atom bomb and nuclear power. Dempster was also well
known as an authority on positive rays.