Lord Blackett

Lord Blackett was born on 18th November, 1897. He was originally trained as a regular officer for the Navy at Osborne Naval College, having started his career as a naval cadet in 1914. He took part in the battles of Falkland Islands and Jutland during World War I. At the end of the war he resigned with the rank of Lieutenant, and took up studies of physics with Lord Rutherford at Cambridge.

In 1921, he started research with cloud chambers, which resulted in the first photographs of the transmutation of nitrogen into an oxygen isotope in 1924. In 1932, together with a young Italian scientist, G.P.S. Occhialini, he designed the counter-controlled cloud chamber, which could take photographs during experiments, including images of cosmic rays. In the spring of 1933 Occhialini and Blackett not only confirmed Anderson's discovery of the protons, but also demonstrated that both protons and electrons in an element had approximately equal numbers. In 1945, after World War II, he resumed his work on cosmic ray investigations at the University of Manchester, focusing on the further study of cosmic ray particles by the counter-controlled cloud chamber in a strong magnetic field, built and used before the War. Lord Blackett received the Nobel Prize in Physics 1948, "for his development of the Wilson cloud chamber method, and his discoveries therewith in the fields of nuclear physics and cosmic radiation".

In 1948 Blackett followed up discussions about the isotropy of cosmic rays and began working on the origin of the interstellar magnetic fields, and in so doing revived interest in 30-year old speculations of Schuster and H. A. Wilson, and others, on the origin of the magnetic field of the earth and sun. He was awarded the Royal Medal by the Royal Society in 1940 and the American Medal for Merit in 1946. He was appointed Head of the Physics Department of the Imperial College, London, in 1953 and retired in July 1963. In 1924 he married Constanza Bayon and they had one son and one daughter. He died in 1974.