Sir James Chadwick

Sir James Chadwick (1891-1974), British physicist and Nobel laureate, who is best known for his discovery in 1932 of one of the fundamental particles of matter, the neutron, a discovery that led directly to nuclear fission and the atomic bomb. He was born in Manchester and educated there at Victoria University. In 1909 he began working under the British physicist Lord Ernest Rutherford. At the end of World War I he went to the University of Cambridge with Rutherford, with whom he continued a fruitful collaboration until 1935. In that year Chadwick became professor at the University of Liverpool. From 1948 to 1958 he was master, and from 1959 a fellow, of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

Chadwick was one of the first in Britain to stress the possibility of the development of an atomic bomb and was the chief scientist associated with the British atomic bomb effort. He spent much of his time from 1943 to 1945 in the United States, principally at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico. A fellow of the Royal Society, Chadwick received the 1935 Nobel Prize in physics and was knighted in 1945.