Francis William AstonBorn 1 Sep 1877; died 20 Nov 1945 at age 68. English chemist, physicist and chemist who was awarded the 1922 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his development of the mass spectrograph, a device that separates atoms or molecular fragments of different mass and measures those masses with remarkable accuracy. In 1910 he became an assistant to Sir J.J. Thomson at Cambridge, who was investigating positively charged rays emanating from gaseous discharges. Aston invented his mass spectrograph (a new type of positive-ray apparatus) after WWI, with which he showed that many elements are mixtures of isotopes. In fact, he discovered 212 of the 287 naturally occurring nuclides. The mass spectrograph is now widely used in geology, chemistry, biology, and nuclear physics. |
