Henry Moseley
Henry Gwyn Jeffreys Moseley (/ˈmoʊzli/; 23 November 1887 – 10 August 1915) was an English physicist, whose contribution to the science of physics was the justification from physical laws of the previous empirical and chemical concept of the atomic number. This stemmed from his development of Moseley's law in X-ray spectra.
For other people named Henry Moseley, see Henry Moseley (disambiguation).
Henry Moseley
10 August 1915 (aged 27)
Matteucci Medal (1919)
Moseley's law advanced atomic physics, nuclear physics and quantum physics by providing the first experimental evidence in favour of Niels Bohr's theory, aside from the hydrogen atom spectrum which the Bohr theory was designed to reproduce. That theory refined Ernest Rutherford's and Antonius van den Broek's model, which proposed that the atom contains in its nucleus a number of positive nuclear charges that is equal to its (atomic) number in the periodic table.[1][2]
When World War I broke out in Western Europe, Moseley left his research work at the University of Oxford behind to volunteer for the Royal Engineers of the British Army. Moseley was assigned to the force of British Empire soldiers that invaded the region of Gallipoli, Turkey, in April 1915, as a telecommunications officer. Moseley was shot and killed during the Battle of Gallipoli on 10 August 1915, at the age of 27. Experts have speculated that Moseley could otherwise have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1916.[3][4]
Biography[edit]
Henry G. J. Moseley, known to his friends as Harry,[5] was born in Weymouth in Dorset in 1887. His father Henry Nottidge Moseley (1844–1891), who died when Moseley was quite young, was a biologist and also a professor of anatomy and physiology at the University of Oxford, who had been a member of the Challenger Expedition. Moseley's mother was Amabel Gwyn Jeffreys, the daughter of the Welsh biologist and conchologist John Gwyn Jeffreys.[6] She was also the British women's champion of chess in 1913.[7][8][a]
Moseley had been a very promising schoolboy at Summer Fields School (where one of the four "leagues" is named after him), and he was awarded a King's scholarship to attend Eton College.[9] In 1906 he won the chemistry and physics prizes at Eton.[10] In 1906, Moseley entered Trinity College of the University of Oxford, where he earned his bachelor's degree. While an undergraduate at Oxford, Moseley became a Freemason by joining the Apollo University Lodge.[11] Immediately after graduation from Oxford in 1910, Moseley became a demonstrator in physics at the University of Manchester under the supervision of Sir Ernest Rutherford. During Moseley's first year at Manchester, he had a teaching load as a graduate teaching assistant, but following that first year, he was reassigned from his teaching duties to work as a graduate research assistant. He declined a fellowship offered by Rutherford, preferring to move back to Oxford, in November 1913, where he was given laboratory facilities but no support.[12]: 95