Everything about F W Aston totally explained
Francis William Aston (born
Harborne,
Birmingham,
September 1 1877; died
Cambridge,
November 20 1945) was a British
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".
Biography and work
Francis Aston was born in Harborne, now part of Greater Birmingham, on September 1, 1877. He was the third child and second son of William Aston and Fanny Charlotte Hollis. He was educated at the Harborne Vicarage School and later Malvern College in Worcestershire where he's a boarder. In 1893 Francis William Aston began his university studies at
Mason College (later part of the
University of Birmingham) where he was taught physics by
John Henry Poynting and chemistry by Frankland and
Tilden. From 1896 on he conducted additional research on
organic chemistry in a private laboratory at his father’s house. In 1898 he started as a student of Frankland financed by a
Forster Scholarship; his work concerned optical properties of
tartaric acid compounds. He started to work on
fermentation chemistry at the school of brewing in Birmingham and was employed by W. Butler & Co. Brewery in 1900. This period of employment ended in 1903 when he returned to the University of Birmingham under Poynting as an Associate.
With a scholarship from the
University of Birmingham he pursued research in physics following the discovery of
X-rays and
radioactivity in the mid-
1890s. Aston studied the flow of current through an
electronic discharge tube (a gas-filled tube with electrodes under high vacuum. The research, conducted with self-made discharge tubes, led him to the investigate the volume of the
Crookes dark space now known as Aston dark space.
After the death of his father, and a trip around the world in 1908, he was appointed lecturer at the University of Birmingham in 1909 but moved to the
Cavendish Laboratory in
Cambridge on the invitation of
J. J. Thomson in 1910.
Joseph John Thomson revealed the nature of the
cathode rays and the discovered the electron and he was now doing research on the positive charged "
Kanalstrahlen" discovered by
Eugen Goldstein in 1886. The method of deflecting particles in the "Kanalstrahlen" by magnetic fields, discovered by
Wilhelm Wien in 1908, and electric fields were used to separate the different ions by their charge and mass. The first sector field mass spectrometer was the result of these experiments. The ions followed a parabolic flight path and were recorded on photographic plates from which their exact mass could be determined by the
mass spectrometer.
It was speculations about isotopy that directly gave rise to the building of a mass spectrometer capable of separating the isotopes of the chemical elements. Aston initially worked on the identification of
isotopes of the element
neon and later chlorine and mercury.
First World War stalled and delayed his research on providing experimental proof for the existence of isotopes by mass spectroscopy and during the war Aston worked at the Royal Airforce Establishment in Farnborough as a Technical Assistant working on aeronautical coatings.
After the war he returned to research at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, and completed building his first
mass spectrograph (now mass spectrometer) that he reported on 1919. Subsequent improvements in the instrument led to the development of a second and third instrument of improved mass resolving power and mass accuracy. These instruments employing electromagnetic focusing allowed him to identify 212 naturally occurring isotopes. In 1921, F. W. Aston became a fellow of the
Royal Society and received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry the following year.
His work on isotopes also led to his formulation of the
Whole Number Rule which states that "the mass of the oxygen isotope being defined, all the other isotopes have masses that are very nearly whole numbers," a rule that was used extensively in the development of
nuclear energy. The exact mass of many isotopes was measured leading to the result that hydrogen has a 1% higher mass than expected by the average mass of the other elements. Aston speculated about the subatomic energy and the use of it in 1936.
Aston was a skilled
photographer and interested in
astronomy. He joined several expeditions to study solar eclipses to Benkoeben in 1925,
Sumatra in 1932; Memphri in
Canada 1936 and Kamishri in
Japan. He also planned to attend expeditions to
South Africa in 1940 and
Brazil in 1945 in later life. Aston died in Cambridge on November 20, 1945,
Private life
In his private life he was a sportsman,
cross-country skiing and
skating in winter time, during his regular visits to
Switzerland and
Norway, deprived of this winter sports during
First World War he started climbing. Between the ages of 20 and 25 he spent a large scale of his spare time
cycling. The new invention of
motorized vehicles he constructed a
combustion engine of his own in 1902 and participated in the
Gordon Bennett Race in Ireland in 1903. Not content with these sports he also engaged in
swimming,
golf, especially with
Rutherford and other colleges in Cambridge
,
tennis, winning some prizes at open tournaments in
England Wales and
Ireland and learning surfing in
Honululu in 1909. Coming from a musical family he was capable to play
piano,
violine and
cello at a level that he regularly was played in the concerts at Cambridge. He visited many places around the globe on extensive travel tours starting from 1908 when he visited and ending with a trip to
Australia and
New Zealand in 1938-1939.
Isotopes (publ. in 1922) and
Mass-spectra- and Isotopes (publ. in 1933) are his most well-known publications.
The
lunar crater Aston was named in his honour.
Further Information
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