James Chadwick Facts
James Chadwick Facts
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| Interesting James Chadwick Facts: |
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| Chadwick was born in Bollington, England and was the eldest son of laborers. |
| Because his parents were poor he could not afford private grammar school but passed the exams for two university scholarships. |
| In 1908 he entered the Victoria University of Manchester and lived at home. |
| In 1909 he received a Heginbottom Scholarship to study physics. |
| The head of the physics department was Ernest Rutherford and he assigned Chadwick to devise a means of comparing the amount of radioactive energy in two different sources. |
| Chadwick graduated with honors in 1911 and in 1912 wrote his first paper on the successful results of his energy experiments. |
| In 1912 he received his M.S. in Science and wrote a paper on the absorption of gamma rays by various gases and liquids. |
| In 1913 he was awarded a scholarship to the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt in Berlin where he studied under Hans Geiger. |
| When World War I started he was a prisoner at the Ruhleben Internment camp near Berlin. |
| In November 1918 he returned to England and secured a teaching position at the University of Manchester. |
| In April 1919 Ernest Rutherford became director of Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge and he brought Chadwick to Cambridge. |
| Chadwick was awarded a Clerk-Maxwell studentship in 1920 and in 1921 he received his PhD. |
| His research with radioactivity had for years pointed to the presence of a light particle with no electrical charge in the nucleus of atoms and in February 1932 Chadwick sent his paper "Possible Existence of a Neutron" to Nature magazine. |
| In May he sent a detailed account of his results entitled "the Existence of a Neutron" to the Royal Society. |
| This discovery made it possible to artificially create elements heavier than uranium. |
| For his discovery of the neutron Chadwick received the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society in 1932, the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1935, the Copley Medal in 1950 and the Franklin Medal in 1951. |
| He was knighted in England in 1945 for his achievements in physics. |
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