Charles Thomson Rees Wilson

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British physicist (1869–1959)

Charles Wilson was the son of a sheep farmer from Glencorse in Scotland, but his father died when he was four and Charles and his mother moved to Manchester. He was educated there and started to specialize in biology but moved to Cambridge University to study physics. There he started work with J. J. Thomson.

Wilson began experiments to duplicate cloud formation in the laboratory by letting saturated air expand, thus cooling it. He found that clouds seemed to need dust particles to start the formation of water droplets and that x-rays, which charged the dust, greatly speeded up the process. Inspired by this, he showed that charged subatomic particles traveling through supersaturated air also formed water droplets. This was the basis of the cloud chamber, which Wilson perfected in 1911 and for which he received the Nobel Prize for physics in 1927. The cloud chamber became an indispensable aid to research into subatomic particles and, with the addition of a magnetic field, made different particles distinguishable by the curvature of their tracks.

The Scottish physicist Charles Thomson Rees Wilson (1869-1959) was the inventor and developer of the Wilson cloud chamber.

Charles Wilson was born on Feb. 14, 1869, in Glencorse near Edinburgh. He received his first undergraduate training at Owens College, now part of the University of Manchester, and from there, at the age of 19, he went to Cambridge University with the realization that physics and not medicine was to be his life's vocation.

As Wilson himself disclosed it, two experiences determined the direction and ultimate fortunes of his interest in physics. One was his few weeks' stay in 1894 at the observatory on the top of Ben Nevis, the highest Scottish mountain. The magnificent optical phenomena observable in the interplay of sunshine, mist, and clouds "greatly excited my interest and made me wish to imitate them in the laboratory." The other experience consisted in his being exposed to an electric storm on the summit of Carn Mor Dearg in 1895. From this came Wilson's strong interest in atmospheric electricity, while the first experience inspired his efforts culminating in the construction of the first cloud chamber.

In the beginning of 1895 Wilson concluded that even after the removal of all dust particles, droplets still appeared whenever a volume of moist air was suddenly expanded. He attributed this to a residual conductivity in the air. His reasoning was fully verified a year later when his primitive cloud chamber was exposed to the newly discovered x-ray radiation. In 1904 he also proved that these droplets could be removed from the chamber by an electric field. Not until 1910, however, did he conceive the idea of making visible and of photographing the path of an ionizing particle. The chamber he designed for that purpose was simplicity itself but rested on many years of painstaking effort. It was a flat cylindrical vessel, 16.5 centimeters in diameter and 3.4 centimeters deep, with a fixed glass roof, and a glass floor that could be rapidly moved downward by a piston into an evacuated vessel.

For almost 20 years Wilson's design remained the standard form of cloud chamber by which he took his famous series of photographs of ionization tracks in 1911 and 1921-1922 respectively. The analysis of those tracks proved to be an invaluable tool for all early investigators of nuclear phenomena. Wilson himself provided the experimental evidence for Arthur Compton's theory that in x-ray scattering, the recoil electron takes up the momentum of the quantum of radiation. Fittingly enough, the two shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1927. It was again the cloud chamber that revealed the existence of positrons and made possible the visual demonstration of "pair creation" and "annihilation" of electrons and positrons.

Upon his retirement from the Jacksonian chair at Cambridge (1925-1934) Wilson took up residence in the village of Carlops near Edinburgh. There he completed his final great study of thundercloud electricity, submitting the manuscript to the Royal Society in 1956, at the age of 87. An indomitable energy and a zest for life were the chief characteristics of Wilson, who took to airplanes for the first time at the age of 86 to observe atmospheric phenomena. He was also possibly the most serene and unassuming among the great scientists of his time. He died at Carlops on Nov. 15, 1959.

Further Reading

The most authoritative account of Wilson's life and work is the lengthy essay by P. M. S. Blackett in Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society (1960). For background see William Dampier, A History of Science (1949), and Mitchell Wilson, American Science and Invention (1954).

1884 - 1940

British soldier, explorer, colonial administrator, oil company executive, author, and politician.

Sir Arnold Talbot Wilson spent the first part of his career in the Persian/Arabian Gulf and Mesopotamia (now Iraq), transferring from the Indian Army to the Indian Political Department in 1909. He was British consul in various parts of southwest Persia (now Iran) between 1907 and 1914 and carried out the earliest cartographic surveys of the area (South-West Persia: A Political Officer's Diary, 1940). He was also a member of the commission to delineate the frontier between the Ottoman Empire and Persia in 1913 - 1914.

For most of the next six years, Wilson was an administrator in Mesopotamia, first as deputy chief political officer to the Indian Expeditionary Force, then as deputy civil commissioner, serving under Sir Percy Cox in both capacities. In Cox's absence in Tehran between 1918 and October 1920, Wilson was appointed acting civil commissioner in Mesopotamia and the crown's political resident in the Gulf. Comparatively young for such responsibilities, Wilson proved an energetic and tireless administrator and inspired intense loyalty in his subordinates (although not in the Civil Commission's oriental secretary, Gertrude Bell). Nevertheless, a combination of temperament and political inclinations made it difficult for him to accept that Britain could not continue to exercise direct colonial control over Iraq as part of any postwar settlement. His refusal to make any concessions to nationalist sentiment was an important, though by no means the only, factor in precipitating the Iraqi revolution against British rule in the summer and autumn of 1920.

Wilson resigned from his post in Baghdad just before Cox's return to the city in October 1920 and spent the next twelve years working for the Anglo - Persian Oil Company, first in Persia and then in London. He was elected to Parliament as a Conservative in 1933 and 1935 and chaired several parliamentary committees. He published two books about his experiences in Iraq (Loyalties: Mesopotamia, 1914 - 1917 [1930] and Mesopotamia, 1917 - 1920: A Clash of Loyalties [1931]). They were colored by his anger at what he saw as the failings of British policy and perhaps as the betrayal of his own ideals.

Bibliography

Marlowe, John. Late Victorian: The Life of Sir Arnold Talbot Wilson. London: Cresset, 1967.

— PETER SLUGLETT

C. T. R. Wilson
The 1927 Solvay conference.
Born	Charles Thomson Rees Wilson 14 February 1869(1869-02-14) Midlothian, Scotland
Died	15 November 1959 (aged 90) Edinburgh, Scotland
Nationality	Scottish
Fields	Physics
Institutions	University of Cambridge
Alma mater	University of Manchester University of Cambridge
Academic advisors	J. J. Thomson
Doctoral students	Cecil Frank Powell
Known for	Cloud chamber
Notable awards	Nobel Prize in Physics 1927

Charles Thomson Rees Wilson CH (14 February 1869 – 15 November 1959) was a Scottish physicist and meteorologist who received the Nobel Prize in physics for his invention of the cloud chamber.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Legacy 3 References 4 External links

Biography

Wilson was born in the parish of Glencorse, Midlothian to a farmer, John Wilson, and his mother Annie Clerk Harper. After his father died in 1873, his family moved to Manchester. He was educated at Owen's College, studying biology with the intent to become a physician. He then went to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge where he became interested in physics and chemistry.^[1]

Wilson thereafter became particularly interested in meteorology, and in 1893 he began to study clouds and their properties. He worked for some time at the observatory on Ben Nevis, where he made observations of cloud formation. He then tried to reproduce this effect on a smaller scale in the laboratory in Cambridge, expanding humid air within a sealed container. He later experimented with the creation of cloud trails in his chamber caused by ions and radiation. For the invention of the cloud chamber he received the Nobel Prize in 1927.

Wilson married Jessie Fraser in 1908, the daughter of a minister from Glasgow, and the couple had four children. He died near Edinburgh, surrounded by his family.

Legacy

The crater Wilson on the Moon is co-named for him, Alexander Wilson and Ralph Elmer Wilson.

The Wilson Condensation Cloud formations, occurring after a very large explosion (such as a nuclear detonation), are named after him.

The Wilson Society, the natural sciences society of Sidney Sussex College, is also named for him.

The archives of Charles Thomson Rees Wilson are maintained by the Archives of the University of Glasgow (GUAS).

References

1. ^ Wilson, Charles Thomson Rees in Venn, J. & J. A., Alumni Cantabrigienses, Cambridge University Press, 10 vols, 1922–1958.

• Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, Isaac Asimov, 2nd ed., Doubleday & C., Inc., ISBN 0-385-17771-2.

External links

• Charles Thomson Rees Wilsons biography

v • d • e Nobel Laureates in Physics Jean Perrin (1926) · Arthur Compton / Charles Wilson (1927) · Owen Richardson (1928) · Louis de Broglie (1929) · C. V. Raman (1930) · Werner Heisenberg (1932) · Erwin Schrödinger / Paul Dirac (1933) · James Chadwick (1935) · Victor Hess / Carl Anderson (1936) · Clinton Davisson / George Thomson (1937) · Enrico Fermi (1938) · Ernest Lawrence (1939) · Otto Stern (1943) · Isidor Rabi (1944) · Wolfgang Pauli (1945) · Percy Bridgman (1946) · Edward Appleton (1947) · Patrick Blackett (1948) · Hideki Yukawa (1949) · Cecil Powell (1950) Complete roster | (1901–1925) | (1926–1950) | (1951–1975) | (1976–2000) | (2001–present)

Persondata
NAME	Wilson, Charles Thomson Rees
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Physicist, Nobel Laureate
DATE OF BIRTH	1869-02-14
PLACE OF BIRTH	Midlothian, Scotland
DATE OF DEATH	1959-11-15
PLACE OF DEATH	Edinburgh, Scotland

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