Francis William Aston

British chemist and physicist

Born: September 1, 1877 · Died: November 20, 1945

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Who was Francis William Aston?

Francis William Aston FRS (1 September 1877 – 20 November 1945) was a British chemist and physicist who won the 1922 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery, by means of his mass spectrograph, of isotopes in many non-radioactive elements and for his enunciation of the whole number rule. He was a fellow of the Royal Society and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Francis Aston was born in Harborne, now part of Birmingham, on. He was the third child and second son of William Aston and Fanny Charlotte Hollis. He was educated at the Harborne Vicarage School and later Malvern College in Worcestershire where he was a boarder. In 1893 Francis William Aston began his university studies at Mason College (which was then external college of University of London) where he was taught physics by John Henry Poynting and chemistry by Frankland and Tilden.

Historical significance

From 1896 on he conducted additional research on organic chemistry in a private laboratory at his father's house. In 1898 he started as a student of Frankland financed by a Forster Scholarship; his work concerned optical properties of tartaric acid compounds.

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