Sir

Owen Richardson

FRS
Richardson in 1928
Born
Owen Willans Richardson

(1879-04-26)26 April 1879
Dewsbury, Yorkshire, UK
Died15 February 1959(1959-02-15) (aged 79)
Alton, Hampshire, England
NationalityBritish
EducationBatley Grammar School
Alma mater
Known forRichardson's law
Einstein–de Haas effect
Awards
Scientific career
FieldsPhysics
Institutions
Doctoral advisorJ. J. Thomson[2]
Doctoral students
Signature

Sir Owen Willans Richardson, FRS[1] (26 April 1879 – 15 February 1959) was a British physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1928 for his work on thermionic emission, which led to Richardson's law.[3][4][5][6][7][8]

Biography

Richardson was born in Dewsbury, Yorkshire, England, the son of Joshua Henry and Charlotte Maria Richardson. He was educated at Batley Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he gained First Class Honours in Natural Sciences.[9] He then got a DSc from University College London in 1904.[9]

After graduating in 1900, he began researching the emission of electricity from hot bodies at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, and in October 1902 he was made a fellow at Trinity.[10] In 1901, he demonstrated that the current from a heated wire seemed to depend exponentially on the temperature of the wire with a mathematical form similar to the Arrhenius equation. This became known as Richardson's law: "If then the negative radiation is due to the corpuscles coming out of the metal, the saturation current s should obey the law ."[11]

Richardson was professor at Princeton University from 1906 to 1913, and returned to the UK in 1914 to become Wheatstone Professor of Physics at King's College London, where he was later made director of research in 1924.[12] In 1927, he was one of the participants of the fifth Solvay Conference on Physics that took place at the International Solvay Institute for Physics in Belgium. He retired from King’s College London in 1944, and died in 1959. He is buried in Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey.

He also researched the photoelectric effect, the gyromagnetic effect, the emission of electrons by chemical reactions, soft X-rays, and the spectrum of hydrogen.

Richardson married Lilian Wilson, sister of his Cavendish colleague Harold Wilson, in 1906, and had two sons and a daughter. Richardson had two sisters. Elizabeth Mary Dixon Richardson married the prominent mathematician Oswald Veblen. Charlotte Sara Richardson married the American physicist (and 1937 Nobel laureate) Clinton Davisson, who was Richardson's PhD student at Princeton. After Lilian's death in 1945, he was remarried in 1948 to Henriette Rupp, a physicist.

Owen Willans Richardson had a son, Harold Owen Richardson, who specialised in Nuclear Physics and was also the chairman of the Physics Department at Bedford College, London University and later on became emeritus professor at London University.

Honours

Richardson's grave in Brookwood Cemetery

Richardson was elected an International Member of the American Philosophical Society in 1910.[13] He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1913,[1] and was awarded its Hughes Medal in 1920. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1928, "for his work on the thermionic phenomenon and especially for the discovery of the law named after him".[14] He was knighted in 1939.

Works

References

  1. 1 2 3 Wilson, Wm (1960). "Owen Willans Richardson 1879–1959". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. Royal Society. 5: 206–215. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1960.0016. S2CID 71230816.
  2. ↑ Rayleigh (1941). "Joseph John Thomson. 1856-1940". Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society. 3 (10): 586–609. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1941.0024.
  3. ↑ "Owen Willans Richardson: The Nobel Prize in Physics 1928". Nobel Lectures, Physics 1922-1941, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam. Nobel Foundation. 1965. Retrieved 18 October 2022.
  4. ↑ Richardson, OW (1921), "Problems of Physics", Science (published 30 September 1921), 54 (1396): 283–91, Bibcode:1921Sci....54..283R, doi:10.1126/science.54.1396.283, PMID 17818864, S2CID 4073897
  5. ↑ Richardson, OW (1913), "The Emission of Electrons From Tungsten at High Temperatures: An Experimental Proof That The Electric Current In Metals Is Carried By Electrons", Science (published 11 July 1913), 38 (967): 57–61, Bibcode:1913Sci....38...57R, doi:10.1126/science.38.967.57, PMID 17830216
  6. ↑ Richardson, OW (1912), "The Laws of Photoelectric Action and the Unitary Theory of Light (Lichtquanten Theorie)", Science (published 12 July 1912), 36 (915): 57–8, Bibcode:1912Sci....36...57R, doi:10.1126/science.36.915.57-a, PMID 17800821, S2CID 39108526
  7. ↑ Richardson, OW; Compton, KT (1912), "The Photoelectric Effect", Science (published 17 May 1912), 35 (907): 783–4, Bibcode:1912Sci....35..783R, doi:10.1126/science.35.907.783, PMID 17792421
  8. ↑ Owen Richardson's Nobel lecture on thermionics, 12 December 1929
  9. 1 2 "Richardson, Owen Willans (RCRT897OW)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
  10. ↑ "University intelligence". The Times. No. 36893. London. 8 October 1902. p. 4.
  11. ↑ O. W. Richardson (1901) "On the negative radiation from hot platinum," Philosophical of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 11 : 286–295; see especially p. 287.
  12. ↑ "Sir Owen Willans Richardson | Nobel Prize, Thermionic Emission, Heat Transfer | Britannica". www.britannica.com. Retrieved 20 October 2023.
  13. ↑ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 7 December 2023.
  14. ↑ Nobel prize citation, Nobel foundation website
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