Owen Willans Richardson (1879-1959)

Awarded the Prize “for his work on the thermionic phenomenon especially for the discovery of the law named after him.”

British physicist. Richardson was born in Dewsbury, Yorkshire on April 26, 1879. He was educated at Cambridge University at London University. In 1902 he was elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He taught at Princeton in America from 1906 to 1913, when he returned to Engl to become Wheatstone Professor of Physics at King’s College, London. In 1911 he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society, in 1913 a Fellow of the Royal Society. Richardson died in Alton, Hampshire on February 15, 1959.