1947: Edward Victor Appleton (1892-1965)

Nobel Prize in Physics 1947

"for his investigations of the physics of the upper atmosphere especially for the discovery of the so-called Appleton layer"

 Edward Appleton was born and educated in Bradford, coming to St John’s in 1911 to read Natural Sciences. He achieved a first class BA in 1914 and after service in the First World War, returned to St John’s as a Foundress Fellow from 1919-1925. During this time he was College Supervisor in both Physics and Mineralogy and an Assistant Demonstrator in Experimental Physics in the University. After that, he spent over a decade at King’s College London, as the Wheatstone Professor of Physics.

In 1924, he began investigation into the strength of the radio signals reaching Cambridge from the BBC in London, proving the existence of a reflective layer of the earth’s atmosphere - ionised gas which reflects medium frequency radio waves - a theory that had been proposed in 1902 by the scientists Oliver Heaviside and Arthur Kennelly (the Kennelly-Heaviside layer). Furthermore, in 1926 his experiments discovered another, higher layer of atmosphere that reflected shorter wavelengths with greater strength (the Appleton layer), enabling long range communication.

His scientific research saw him elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1927. He was awarded the Hughes Medal in 1933, the Bakerian Lecture in 1937 ("Regularities and Irregularities in the Ionosphere”) and the Royal Medal in 1950, “For his work on the ele [sic] transmission of electromagnetic waves round the earth and for his investigations of the ionic state of the upper atmosphere”.

He returned to Cambridge in 1936 to become Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy (and again, a Fellow of the College). This lasted only three years, however, as on the outbreak of the Second World War he was appointed Secretary of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. His research was instrumental to Robert Weston-Watt’s invention of the radar, a key component of the allied success in the Battle of Britain. He was made Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB) in 1941 and Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire (GBE) in 1946.

In 1947, Appleton was the recipient of three prestigious honours: The Nobel Prize for Physics, the US Medal for Merit and the Norwegian Cross of Freedom. In 1949, he left the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, to take up the position of Principal and Vice Chancellor at Edinburgh University, where he remained until his death in 1965.