These are listed below in chronological order of the recipients birth date. There is also a list of names proposed but not yet approved. To simplify access to them two other lists are provided:
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Canton was born and spent his formative years in Stroud, Gloucestershire. Although he left school early in order to go into the family business, Canton continued to study in his own time. A Dissenting preacher from Stroud, Dr. Henry Miles, noticed his talent, and arranged for him to leave home, and eventually to become articled to Samuel Watkins, master of a school near to what is now Liverpool Street Station in London. Having served his apprenticeship from 1738-1745, Canton succeeded Watkins and kept the school until his death 27 years later. Henry Miles became FRS in 1743, and through him, Canton was able to mix in natural philosophical circles, and by the late 1740s, had acquired a reputation as an experimentalist. He was made FRS in 1749, despite being involved in a priority dispute over a novel method of making artificial magnets. His main field, however, was electrostatics. He was the first person in England to repeat the French experiments confirming Franklin's theories of lightning, and whilst doing this, became drawn to the mystery of the polarity of the charge on a cloud. He invented a portable electroscope to detect charge present in a system, and it is for experiments on electrostatic induction that Canton remains well-known. "Liberal in politics, latitudinarian in religion, devoted to his profession, schoolmaster Canton was one of the most distinguished of the group of self-made, self-educated men who were the best representatives of English physics in the mid-eighteenth century."1
1 J.L. Heilbron, Dictionary of Scientific Biography "Canton" p.52
Born and brought up in Yorkshire, Priestley was educated for the ministry, and attended the Dissenting Academy at Daventry until 1755. After two unsuccessful posts as preacher, he set up a school in Cheshire, where he gained such a good reputation that he was invited to become a tutor at the Dissenting Academy at Warrington. He took up this post in 1761, and taught many things including languages, history, law and oratory, but not natural philosophy! He became a prolific writer, with publications ranging from The Rudiments of English Grammar to Essay on the First Principles of Government, which was said to have influenced Jeremy Bentham. He also began writing on scientific matters, though, and completed his History of Electricity in 1767. Whilst researching this book, he had met up with Benjamin Franklin and John Canton (see above) in London, and had been elected FRS at their suggestion. Priestley and his family (he had married in 1762) moved to Leeds in 1767, where he took up a Presbyterian ministry, and also began his researches into the nature and properties of gases for which he is now famous. In 1773, he entered the service of the Earl of Shelburne, as librarian and advisor to the household tutor, and continued to study gases under his patronage, in the family homes in Wiltshire and London. In 1780, he moved his family to Birmingham, where he took up another preaching post, and became involved with the famous Lunar Society (which counted amongst its members at that time Erasmus Darwin and James Watt). The society supported his researches into gases, and his opposition to the new chemistry of Lavoisier.
In 1791, he spoke out in favour of the initial phases of the French Revolution. This, together with his continued vocal opposition to sectarian intolerance within England led to his property being burnt by a "Church-and-King" mob, and his life being endangered. For a while he lived in Hackney, teaching natural philosophy and preaching at the Dissenting Academy there, but in 1794, he felt it necessary to emigrate to the United States. When he arrived, he was well-received, and offered a position as Professor of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. He turned this down, however, in favour of settling in an area reserved for British people fleeing persecution. This settlement never really took off, but the Priestleys elected to remain there. Priestley became very unhappy after his wife and one of his sons died in the mid-1790s, but his grief was tempered slightly in his latter years when Thomas Jefferson was elected President in 1800. He had supported Jefferson's cause throughout, and Jefferson personally befriended him, and at last he felt as if he were in a country where the political authorities were not going to persecute him. He died in 1804, and was buried in Northumberland, Pennsylvania.
This plaque jointly commemmorates John Dalton and Sir Arthur Eddington, both of whom were associated with this school. Dalton was a teacher at the school from 1781 to 1793, the founder of atomic theory and the `father' of modern chemistry.
Maxwell was one of the most eminent theoretical physicists of the nineteenth century. He was educated in Edinburgh, and entered the University at 16, having had a paper published the previous year by the Royal Society of Edinburgh on a method of drawing ellipses using pins and thread. After becoming Second Wrangler at Trinity College, Cambridge, he obtained a chair at Aberdeen, but moved down to the Strand in 1860 when he was made redundant in an administrative reorganisation. His legacy to electromagnetism, the Maxwell Equations, were put forward in 1864. He worked for five years at King's College, on the British Association project to measure electrical standards, but resigned and returned to Scotland on the death of his father (his mother having died when he was still a child). He returned to Cambridge in the early 1870s, to set up the Cavendish Laboratory from scratch, but tragically died of cancer at the age of 48. He was succeeded in his post by Lord Rayleigh.
The plaque is on the gable end of a row of houses known as 'The Views' in Penkhull, Staffordshire. The wording is "The Views, Penkhull, Birthplace of Sir Oliver Lodge 1851 -1940, Distinguished Scientist and Pioneer of Wireless Telegraphy"
Parsons, a physicist and engineer, was President of the Institute from 1923-25. His father was an astronomer and maker of outstanding telescopes, and eventually became President of the Royal Society. After studying in Dublin and Cambridge, Parsons undertook an apprenticeship in engineering, and throughout his life, he continued to combine his knowledge of theory and practice, in the tradition of Kelvin and Watt, to produce original work in the fields of power generation and marine propulsion. He designed and patented a multistage, high- pressure steam turbine for use in the firm where he worked, and by the end of the nineteenth century, had set up his own company to make turbo-generators, especially for use in marine power. He displayed his 48 m craft, Turbinia, at the 1897 naval celebrations of Victoria's jubilee, where its capacity to travel at over 34 knots so impressed the Navy that HMS Dreadnought was fitted with his turbines. Later on in the early years of the twentieth century, Cunard used the turbines in their liners. Later work included the construction of searchlights, also for use by the Navy, and large telescopes, following in the footsteps of his father.
Having been brought up in his uncle's house after the death of his mother, Bragg went on to study mathematics at Cambridge. He was an assiduous worker, and graduated with first class honours. Soon after, he became professor of mathematics and physics at the University of Adelaide, where he published very little, but was very involved with the public understanding of science, science education and university administration. He married an astronomer's daughter, had a family, and took up golf. As part of his 1904 presidential address to a section of the Australian Association for the Advancement of Science, however, he gave a highly critical talk on current work in the field of the ionisation of gases, especially the scattering of a, b and g rays by matter. Later on that year, at the age of 41, he began the work that was to bring him wider recognition. He did experiments into the absorption of a-particles, leading to the development of a method of identifying radioactive substances. His next field of research was into the nature of X-rays and g-rays, advocating a "quantised" view of X-rays. His controversial view that ionisation of matter by these rays is a secondary process involving a high speed electron was eventually confirmed by C.T.R. Wilson's cloud chamber (see below). He became Cavendish professor of physics at the University of Leeds in 1908, and together with his son (who was working at the Cavendish) worked on the recently-discovered von-Laue phenomenon. They became convinced that a theory of X-rays should take account of both waves and corpuscles. The Braggs then became interested in the inversion of the relation they had earlier discovered, nl = 2dsinq, to obtain the distances between atomic planes in a crystal using a ray of known wavelength, thus transforming the analysis of crystal structures into a straightforward procedure. During the First World War, he did some research into crystals, but most of his time was spent in positions of management and as an advisor. He worked on submarine detection, and was knighted in 1920. During the war, Britain fell behind in X-ray spectroscopy, but in 1923, Bragg became head of the Royal Institution, and set up a research group to work on the analysis of organic crystals, a field in which Britain was then able to excel. Bragg was President of the Royal Society from 1935-1940. He had been a member of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft since before the First World War, and at the outbreak of the Second, tried unsuccessfully to further understanding between British and German scientists. The last two years of his life were taken up with scientific administration in the war effort.
As Wilson was a Scottish scientist born in the nineteenth century, he had to have "Thomson" in his name. For variety, however, he chose to use it as a middle name. Although born in Scotland, he moved to Manchester when he was four years old. His immediate family was not well off, and his education was paid for by his businessman step-brother, William, based in Calcutta. After starting off as a medical student, he changed to physics, following a BSc at Owens College, Manchester, with a period at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. In order to support his mother after the death of his Calcutta step-brother in 1892, he took a teaching job at Bradford Grammar School, but after a short while, he returned to Cambridge, where he managed to support himself by being a demonstrator for medical students. It was at this time that Rutherford and his contemporaries started research in the department, and Wilson often took part in their discussions. He was awarded the Clerk Maxwell scholarship (less than twenty years after Maxwell had died) for three years, then went on to hold posts as demonstrator, lecturer, and finally Jacksonian professor of natural philosophy. Many honours were bestowed upon him, including FRS in 1900 and a Nobel prize shared with A. H. Compton in 1927, for their work on high-energy photon scattering.
Wilson's blue plaque is on a cairn in the hills because he was profoundly influenced by the beauty and truth of Nature. He spent much of his life walking and climbing in Scotland, and used to spend time on Ben Nevis, observing natural phenomena such as coronas, and electric storms. His invention of the cloud chamber, an invaluable piece of apparatus in the physicist's armoury, was inspired by his wish to emulate the stunning cloud formations that he witnessed whilst on the mountains; and his research into atmospheric electricity was stirred by experiencing his hair standing on end when he was once caught in a storm. This gave him a glimpse of the magnitude of the forces and fields he was investigating. His work on the conductivity of air later inspired Victor Hess, who subsequently postulated the existence of "cosmic radiation".
As an Oxford Chemistry graduate, Soddy went to work as a demonstrator in Montreal. There, he collaborated with Rutherford at the start of this century on an explanation of the nature of radioactivity. In their disintegration theory, they proposed that heavy atoms are unstable, and that changes in their mass and charge cause the formation of new elements. In 1913, he was among those who formulated the radioactive displacement law of emission of alpha and beta particles, and he gave us the word "isotopes". Having gained a chair at Oxford, he became more involved with politics and administration after his efforts to reform the teaching of chemistry went unheeded. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921.
This plaque jointly commemmorates John Dalton and Sir Arthur Eddington, both of whom were associated with this school. Eddington was born at the school. where his father was headmaster, in 1882. he later bcame the author of The Expanding Universe, sometime chief assitant at the Royal Greenwich Observatory and Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge
Educated in Glasgow, Baird's initial studies were in electrical engineering. He began serious experiment, however, in the early 1920s, after a serious illness. His previous record of poor health had meant that his earlier attempts to earn a living selling household goods were unsuccessful. His first television apparatus was able to transmit and receive pictures over a range of a few feet, and the first demonstration took place in two attic rooms in Soho in 1926. In the following years, the range of his apparatus increased rapidly, transmitting via telephone line from London to Glasgow in 1927, and to New York in 1928. The first BBC television pictures were transmitted by Baird's company in 1929, but the system that the BBC eventually adopted was that of Marconi-EMI. Although his particular methods have now largely been superseded, he also experimented with stereo and large-screen formats, and UHF transmission, pioneering techniques which are often considered nowadays to be modern developments.
Appleton studied at what is now the Bradford and Ilkley Community College from 1911 to 1913. He studied physics at Cambridge, but his interest in radio waves stemmed from his time as a signals officer in the First World War. After Kennelly and Heaviside had proposed the existence of a layer of charged particles in the atmosphere, to explain the observation that it was possible to send radio waves around the world, despite the propensity of electromagnetic radiation to travel in straight lines, Appleton was the first to demonstrate conclusively the existence of such a layer. By measuring the interference between initial and reflected waves sent between Bournemouth and Cambridge, he was able to calculate the height of this layer to be 70 km above the Earth's surface. Although this first layer was named after Heaviside, a second, slightly higher, layer was subsequently discovered, and named after Appleton. He received the Nobel Prize for physics in 1947.
In 1939 Edmund Stoner was appointed as the first Professor of Theoretical Physics at Leeds. In 1951 he was given the post of Cavendish Professor of Physics, the chair accepted by Bragg in 1908. His research included the structure of atoms, "white dwarfs" in the far reaches of outer space and the theory of ferromagnetic materials.
Dirac was a theoretical physicist who was awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 1933 jointly with Erwin Schr�dinger "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory". He developed Heisenberg's quantum mechanics to make a theory of the electron and predicted the existence of the positron
At the early age of 27, Williams had obtained an MSc, a DSc and two PhDs and at 36 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. During the Second World War he worked in the Department of Naval Operational Research where it is recorded of him that, "no individual contributed more to the defeat of the U-Boat."
Walton undertook undergraduate and postgraduate studies at Trinity College, Dublin, before going up to Cambridge University. Whilst there, he worked with John Cockcroft on the first ever nuclear accelerator experiment, using protons accelerated to 700 keV. (They were jointly awarded the 1951 Nobel prize for physics for this work on transmutation of atomic nuclei by artificially accelerated atomic particles). Two years after this collaboration, in 1934, he returned to Trinity college, and remained there until his retirement in 1974. Walton lived until the age of 91, having presented his Nobel citation and medal to his college on his 90th birthday. One of the reasons that Mary Robinson agreed to unveil this plaque at the very end of her term of office was that he was one of her sponsors when she stood for election to the Irish Senate.
This plaque jointly commemmorates John Dalton and Sir Arthur Eddington, both of whom were associated with this school. Eddington was born at the school. where his father was headmaster, in 1882. he later bcame the author of The Expanding Universe, sometime chief assisstant at the Royal Greenwich Observatory and Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge
Dame Kathleen was one of the first women physicists to be elected to Fellowship of the Royal Society. Although born in Ireland, Lonsdale moved to London when she was a child, where she graduated in Physics in the early 1920s. After working at the Royal Institution for twenty years, she moved to University College, London. It was there that she did her major work on the structure of organic crystals, using X-ray diffraction. Having disclosed the structure of hexamethylbenzene with this method, she went on to pioneer the technique of using Fourier analysis to solve the structure of her next organic compound, hexachlorobenzene. As a pacifist and Quaker, Lonsdale spent a month in prison during the Second World War for failing to pay a fine charged to her for not enrolling for any form of national service. Legend has it that she put her time in prison to good use by working theoretically on the classification scheme for crystals which later became the International Tables of Crystallography . Two years later, however, in 1945, she and Marjory Stephenson (a Cambridge biochemist and microbiologist) were elected as the first two female Fellows of the Royal Society. The Lonsdale Building of University College, London, is named in her honour.
Born and educated in Australia, Massey took his first three degrees at the University of Melbourne. After gaining his doctorate from Cambridge in 1932, he became a lecturer in Mathematical Physics at the Queens University, Belfast. He then moved to University College, London, where he remained until his retirement, starting as Goldsmid Professor of Mathematics in 1938, and ending as head of the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Towards the end of his career, he also spent four years as Vice-Provost of the college. He was heavily involved in scientific administration, becoming President of the Atomic Scientists Association in 1953, President of the Physical Society in 1954, and Chairman of the Council of Science Policy in 1965. As well as gaining many prestigious medals from the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society during his lifetime, a building at the Anglo-Australian base laboratory was named in his honour in 1984, the year after his death.