Current Topics and Events

Abstract

THE President and Council of the Royal Society have appointed Prof. O. W. Richardson of King's College, London, to be the third Yarrow Research Professor of the Royal Society. It is understood that Prof. Richardson will remain a member of King's College and will continue to carry out his researches in the Physics Laboratory of the College. He has both mathematical and experimental ability to a remarkable degree, and there are very few living physicists in whom the combination of talents is so strongly developed. Educated at Batley Grammar School and at Trinity College, Cambridge, he had a distinguished academic career and was elected to a college fellowship. After some years spent in research at the Cavendish Laboratory, he received an appointment as professor of physics at the University of Princeton, but returned to England in 1913 to take up the post of Wheatstone professor of physics at King's College, London. During the War, Prof. Richardson rendered important services to the Government in connexion with scientific research, more particularly with regard to instruments for the detection of hostile submarines. In 1920 he was awarded the Hughes medal by the Royal Society “for his researches on the passage of electricity through gases, and especially for those relating to the emission of electrons from hot bodies-a subject which Prof. Richardson has made his own and christened ‘thermionics.’ “The subject is of great industrial importance. Probably few of the many thousands who now use thermionic valves in the reception of wireless messages realise how much they owe to the work of such pioneers. From the scientific point of view the subject is of equal importance; by employing modern methods of obtaining high vacua, it is now possible to produce the pure electron discharge from white-hot metals of intensity great enough to convince the most sceptical that electrons are no mere figments of the physicist's imagination. Prof. Richardson's name is also associated with the gyromagnetic effect, the existence of which he predicted before it was experimentally verified. The observed change of angular momentum accompanying magnetisation is not, however, what might have been expected had negative electrons only been concerned in the process, and it is probable that the result has an important bearing on the structure of the atomic nucleus. Two important text-books by Prof. Richardson have now reached a second edition: one dealing with the theory of electrons mainly from a mathematical point of view; the other treating of the subject which is peculiarly his own. The Emission of Electricity from Hot Bodies.”