Cecil Powell
Biography
Cecil Frank Powell was born on December 5th, 1903, at Tonbridge, Kent,
where his father, Frank Powell, was one of a family of gunsmiths who had
long practised the trade in the town. His grandfather, George Bisacre,
had established a private school in the nearby town of Southborough and
his family ties and influences therefore tended to encourage a regard
for the value both of learning and the practical arts.
He attended a local elementary school and won a scholarship, at
the age of eleven, to Judd School, Tonbridge. From there he won
open scholarships to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he graduated
with First Class Honours in the Natural Science Tripos
(1924-1925).
As a postgraduate student, Powell worked in the Cavendish Laboratory under
C.T.R. Wilson and Lord Rutherford until 1927 when he gained his Ph.D.
and moved to the University of Bristol as Research Assistant to A.M. Tyndall
in the H.H. Wills Physical Laboratory. He was eventually appointed lecturer,
then reader and, in 1936, he visited the West Indies as seismologist of
an expedition investigating volcanic activity. He returned to Bristol
in the following year and in 1948 he was established as Melville Wills
Professor of Physics.
Powell was Director of a European expedition for making
high-altitude balloon flights in Sardinia (1952) and in the Po
Valley (1954, 1955, and 1957).
His first researches at the Cavendish Laboratory concerned
condensation phenomena and it led indirectly to an explanation of
the anomalously high rate of discharge of steam through nozzles.
He showed this to be due to the existence of supersaturation in
the rapidly expanding steam and his results were found to have a
bearing on the design and performance of the steam turbine.
At Bristol he devoted years of patient work to the development of
accurate techniques for measuring the mobility of positive ions
and to establishing the nature of the ions in most of the common
gases. After his sojourn in the Caribbean, he returned to work on
the construction of a Cockcroft generator for accelerating fast
protons and deuterons - employing them in conjunction with a
Wilson chamber, to study neutron-proton scattering. In 1938, he
undertook experiments in cosmic radiation and employed methods of
directly recording the tracks of the particles in photographic
emulsions and, when the Cockcroft machine came into operation, he
employed similar methods for determining the energy of neutrons,
that is, by observing the tracks of the recoiling protons. The
length of the track of a charged particle in the emulsion was
found to give an accurate measure of its range and the great
advantages of this method for experiments in nuclear physics were
soon clearly established.
This development led him to a study of the scattering and
disintegration processes produced by a beam of high-energy
deuterons and he later returned, with the development of
photographic emulsions of increased sensitivity, to experiments
on cosmic radiation: in 1947 heavy mesons were discovered and
many of their more important properties established.
Powell has contributed numerous papers to learned societies on
the discharge of electricity in gases, and on the development of
photographic methods in nuclear physics. He is a co-author of
Nuclear Physics in Photographs (1947) and The Study of
Elementary Particles by the Photographic Method (1959).
Prof. Powell was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1949: he
was awarded the Hughes Medal in the same year and the Royal Medal
in 1961. He has received honorary Doctor of Science degrees from
the Universities of
Dublin, Bordeaux and Warsaw, and he is a Foreign Member of
the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. He was Vernon Boys
Prizeman and Honorary Fellow of the Physical Society (1947), and
he served on the Scientific Policy Committee of the European
Organization for Nuclear Research (Geneva, 1961).
Powell married Isobel Therese Artner, who has assisted him in his
researches, in 1932; they have two daughters. His chief
recreations are squash racquets and tennis.
From Nobel Lectures, Physics 1942-1962, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1964
This autobiography/biography was first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.
Cecil Powell died on August 9, 1969.
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1950