John Cockcroft

For the politician of the same name, see John Cockroft (politician).

Sir John Douglas Cockcroft (May 27, 1897 – September 18, 1967) was a British physicist. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics for splitting the atomic nucleus, and was instrumental in the development of nuclear power.

Cockcroft was born in Todmorden, England the eldest son of a Mill owner. He was educated at Todmorden Grammar School (1909-1914) and studied mathematics at the University of Manchester (1914-1915) and Manchester College of Technology (1919-1920). He was a signaller in the Royal Artillery from 1915-1918. Cockcroft received a mathematics degree from St. John's College, Cambridge in 1924, and began research work under Ernest Rutherford. In 1929 he was elected a Fellow of St. John's College.

In 1928 he began to work on the acceleration of protons with Ernest Walton. In 1932 they bombarded lithium with high energy protons, and succeeded in transmuting it into helium and other chemical elements. This was the first occasion on which an atomic nucleus of one element had been successfully changed to a different nucleus by artificial means. This feat was popularly — if somewhat inaccurately — known as splitting the atom.

At the outbreak of the Second World War he took up the post of Assistant Director of Scientific Research in the Ministry of Supply, working on radar. In 1944 he took charge of the Canadian Atomic Energy project and became Director of the Montreal and Chalk River Laboratories. In 1946 he returned to Britain to set up the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, charged with developing Britain's atomic power programme. He became the first director of AERE. Even when leaving the post he continued to be involved with Harwell. He was made a CBE in 1944, knighted in 1948, and was created Knight Commander of the Bath in 1953.

As director of the AERE he famously insisted that the coolant discharge chimney stacks of the Windscale plutonium production reactors were fitted, at great expense, with high performance filters. Since this was decided after the stacks had been designed, they produced iconic lumps in the shape of the structures. The reactors were designed to remain clean and uncorroded during use, and as such it was not considered that there would be any particulate present for the filters to catch. These filters therefore were known as "Cockcroft's Folly" right up until the core of one of the two reactors caught fire in 1957, at which point the nickname fell out of favour.

In 1951 Cockcroft, along with Walton, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in the use of accelerated particles to study the atomic nucleus. In 1959 he became the first Master of Churchill College, Cambridge. He was president of the Institute of Physics, the Physics Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Cockcroft served as chancellor of the Australian National University from 1961-65.

Cockcroft married Eunice Elizabeth Crabtree in 1925 and had four daughters and two sons. He died at Churchill College, Cambridge.

Today, two buildings are named for him. One, the New Museums Site of the University of Cambridge, comprising a lecture theatre and several hardware laboratories, the other being the Cockcroft Institute at Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire. The oldest building at the Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering, Australian National University, the Cockcroft building, is named after him.

Further reading

• Cathcart, Brian, The Fly in the Cathedral, Penguin, 2005. ISBN 0-14-027906-7

External links

• Biography from Cambridge manuscripts library
• Biography from the Nobel Museum
• Another Nobel biography
• Speech to the Empire Club of Canada
• Annotated bibliography for John Cockcroft from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues