Francis William Aston (1877-1945)

Awarded the Prize “for his discovery, by means of his mass spectrograph, of isotopes, in a large number of non-radioactive elements, for his enunciation of the whole-number rule.”

British chemist physicist. Aston was born in Harborne, Engl on September 1, 1877. He was educated at Mason College where he studied chemistry. In 1903 he obtained a scholarship to Birmingham University. At the end of 1909 he was invited to the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge. He became a research fellow at Cambridge in 1920 stayed there for the rest of his life, apart from the war years spent at the Royal Aircraft Establishment. He died at Cambridge on November 20, 1945.