Francis William Aston

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Francis William Aston (born Harborne/Birmingham, September 1, 1877; died Cambridge, November 20, 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 a large number of non-radioactive elements, and for his enunciation of the whole-number rule".[1]

In 1903 Francis William Aston, a trained chemist, won a scholarship to the University of Birmingham (near to his birthplace in the southwest of Birmingham) to study physics due to the discovery of X-rays and radioactivity in the mid-1890s. It was in his studies of the creation of X-rays by means of the flow of current through an electronic discharge tube (a gas-filled tube with electrodes) there that he discovered the phenomenon now known as the Aston Dark Space.

In 1909 he moved to the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge on the invitation of J. J. Thomson and worked on the identification of isotopes of the element neon (1912). He also held lectures at the Trinity College, Cambridge. Returning to these studies after the First World War in 1919, he used a method of electromagnetic focusing to invent the mass spectrograph, which rapidly allowed him to identify no fewer than 212 of the 287 naturally occurring isotopes. In 1921 F. W. Aston became a fellow of the famous Royal Society.

His work on isotopes also led to his formulation of the Whole Number Rule which states that "the mass of the oxygen isotope being defined, all the other isotopes have masses that are very nearly whole numbers," a rule that was used extensively in the development of nuclear energy.

Isotopes (publ. in 1922) and Mass-spectra- and Isotopes (publ. in 1933) are his most well-known publications.

The lunar crater Aston was named in his honour.