ISBN: 9781156968406

Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: … Meer...

Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Sir John Douglas Cockcroft, OM, KCB, CBE (27 May 1897 18 September 1967) was a British physicist. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics for splitting the atomic nucleus, and was instrumental in the development of nuclear power. Cockcroft was born in Todmorden, England the eldest son of a mill owner. He Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Sir John Douglas Cockcroft, OM, KCB, CBE (27 May 1897 18 September 1967) was a British physicist. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics for splitting the atomic nucleus, and was instrumental in the development of nuclear power. Cockcroft was born in Todmorden, England the eldest son of a mill owner. He was educated at Todmorden Secondary School (19091914) (where his physics teacher, Luke Sutcliffe, would later tutor another future Nobel Prize-winner, Geoffrey Wilkinson) and studied mathematics at the Victoria University of Manchester (19141915). He was a signaller in the Royal Artillery from 1915 to 1918. After the war ended, he studied electrotechnical engineering at Manchester College of Technology from 1919 until 1920. Cockcroft received a mathematics degree from St. John's College, Cambridge in 1924 and began research work under Ernest Rutherford. In 1929 he was elected a Fellow of St. John's College. In 1928, he began to work on the acceleration of protons with Ernest Walton. In 1932, they bombarded lithium with high energy protons and succeeded in transmuting it into helium and other chemical elements. This was one of the earliest experiments to change the atomic nucleus of one element to a different nucleus by artificial means. This feat was popularly if somewhat inaccurately known as splitting the atom. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he took up the post of Assistant Director of Scientific Research in the Ministry of Supply, working on radar. In 1944, he took charge of the Canadian Atomic Energy project and became Director of the Montreal Laboratory and Chalk River Laboratories, replacing Hans von Halban, who was considered a security risk. In 1946, he returned to Britain to set up the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (A. More: Books, , Masters-of-Churchill-College-Cambridge~~Books-LLC, , , , , , , , , , General Books LLC<