James Chadwick

Claimed by Natalie Payne (npayne7)

Early Life and Education

Sir James Chadwick was born on October 20th, 1891 in Bollington, Cheshire, England. He was the eldest child of Joseph Chadwick and Mary Knowles. His parents moved to Manchester, England in 1894 while he remained in Bollington with his grandmother. He joined his parents in Manchester at age 11 while attending the Central Grammar School for Boys. After graduation from secondary school in 1908, he matriculated at the Victoria University of Manchester. He intended to study mathematics, but he enrolled in the physics program by mistake, and he graduated from the university's Honours School of Physics in 1911. His next two years were spent at the Physical Laboratory in Manchester working on various radioactivity problems under Ernest Rutherford, and he earned a M.Sc in 1913.

Research

Germany

In 1913, he was awarded the 1851 Exhibition Scholarship to be able to move to Berlin and study at the Physikalisch Technische Reichsanstalt under Hans Geiger. There he studied beta radiation, and with the help of the newly invented Geiger counter, Chadwick was able to demonstrate that beta radiation produces a complete (continuous) spectrum and not just spectral lines as previously thought. He was still in Berlin at the time of the outbreak of World War I, and was interned at the Ruhleben internment camp for the duration of the war. After his release, he accepted the Wollaston Studentship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and moved back to England.