John Cockcroft

Also known as John Douglas Cockcroft, Sir John Douglas Cockcroft

British physicist (1897–1967)

OverviewAI-generated

John Cockcroft was a British physicist and nuclear physicist who also worked as a university teacher. Born in Todmorden in 1897, he served in the Royal Artillery and British Army during World War I. His professional career included positions at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Ministry of Supply, Montreal Laboratory, and Chalk River Laboratories. He was educated at the Victoria University of Manchester, the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, and St John's College, University of Cambridge, where his doctoral advisor was Ernest Rutherford.

Cockcroft was a member of the Royal Society, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the Knight of the Legion of Honour, the Atoms for Peace Award, and the Commander of the Order of the British Empire. He was also a Fellow of the Royal Society and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics and the Medal of Freedom. He participated in the Manhattan Project and died at Churchill College in 1967.

Synthesized by Vinony from 28 facts across 3 sources: Wikidata, Nobel Prize, Vinony collections. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.

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John Cockcroft is indexed among the 230 entries in Vinony's Nobel Prize in Physics collection. It also appears in Nobel Laureates.

Vinony's link graph records 665 inbound references to John Cockcroft, and connects out to World War II, nuclear weapon and Pyotr Kapitsa.

It sits within the topics 1897 births, 1967 deaths and 20th-century British physicists.

Vinony links it to 79 Wikipedia language editions.

Nobel Prize

The Nobel Prize in Physics1951
“for their pioneer work on the transmutation of atomic nuclei by artificially accelerated atomic particles”
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Wikidata facts

Instance of: human
Given name: Douglas
Gender: male
Citizenship: United Kingdom
Place of birth: Todmorden
Place of death: Churchill College
Occupation: university teacher
Educated at: University of Cambridge
Employer: Ministry of Supply
Languages spoken: English language
Participant in: Manhattan Project
Doctoral advisor: Ernest Rutherford
Field of work: physics
Conflict: World War I
Military branch: British Army
Image: Cockcroft.jpg

Show 8 more facts

member of: American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Commons category: John Douglas Cockcroft
date of birth: 1897-05-27
date of death: 1967-09-18
Erdős number: 6
nominated for: Medal of Freedom
maintained by WikiProject: WikiProject Mathematics
interested in: physics

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Encyclopedic overview

Sir John Douglas Cockcroft (27 May 1897 – 18 September 1967) was a British experimental physicist who shared the 1951 Nobel Prize in Physics with Ernest Walton for their splitting of the atomic nucleus, which led to the development of nuclear power and weapons.

After service on the Western Front with the Royal Field Artillery during the Great War, Cockcroft studied electrical engineering at Manchester Municipal College of Technology whilst he was an apprentice at Metropolitan Vickers Trafford Park and was also a member of their research staff. He then won a scholarship to St John's College, Cambridge, where he sat the Tripos exam in June 1924, becoming a Wrangler. Ernest Rutherford accepted Cockcroft as a research student in the Cavendish Laboratory, and Cockcroft completed his doctorate under Rutherford's supervision in 1928. With Walton and Mark Oliphant, he built what became known as a Cockcroft–Walton generator. Cockcroft and Walton used this to perform the first artificial disintegration of an atomic nucleus, a feat popularly known as "splitting the atom."

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “John Cockcroft” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.