1983 John Adam Fleming Award

Abstract

Professor Runcorn's career began on a rather auspicious note. In the late forties, as a graduate student under Professor P. M. S. Blackett at Manchester, Runcorn demonstrated, along with others, that the intensity of the earth's magnetic field increases as you go into the earth. This was an outcome contrary to what Professor Blackett had predicted as a result of his theory on the generation of magnetic fields by rotating bodies—in this case, the earth.After his graduate studies in Manchester, Professor Runcorn returned to Cambridge where he became a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College and Assistant Director of Research in Geophysics. Professor Runcorn and his students immediately set up a laboratory for the study of the magnetism of rocks using the sensitive astatic magnetometers developed by the Blackett group for research on the magnetism of rotating bodies.