Ronald George Wreyford Norrish
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Ronald George Wreyford Norrish
British chemist (1897–1978)
Norrish was educated at the university in his native Cambridge. Apart from the war years, he spent his whole career there, serving as professor of physical chemistry from 1937 until 1965.
Norrish made his important contributions to chemistry in the fields of photochemistry and chemical kinetics, being introduced to these by Eric Rideal during his PhD work. From 1949 to 1965 he collaborated with his former pupil George Porter in the development of flash photolysis and kinetic spectroscopy for the investigation of very fast reactions. For their work they shared the 1967 Nobel Prize for chemistry with Manfred Eigen.
Norrish also made a significant contribution to chemistry when he showed the need to modify Draper's law. In the mid-19th century John Draper proposed his law that the amount of photochemical change is proportional to the intensity of the light multiplied by the time for which it acts. Norrish was able to show that the rate should be proportional to the square root of the light intensity.
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Ronald George Wreyford Norrish
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Ronald George Wreyford Norrish
Norrish, Ronald George Wreyford, 1897-1978, British chemist, Ph.D. Cambridge, 1925. He joined the faculty at Cambridge in 1925 and was a professor there until he retired in 1965. Norrish was awarded the 1967 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with George Porter and Manfred Eigen for their studies of extremely fast chemical reactions. Norrish and Porter used a technique known as flash photolysis to study the intermediate stages of high-velocity reactions. Prior to the work of the three Nobelists, the study of short-lived high-energy molecules and their chemical characteristics was impossible.
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Ronald George Wreyford Norrish
| Ronald George Wreyford Norrish | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | 9 November 1897 Cambridge, United Kingdom |
| Died | 7 June 1978 (aged 80) Cambridge, United Kingdom |
| Nationality | United Kingdom |
| Fields | Chemistry |
| Institutions | Cambridge University |
| Alma mater | Cambridge University |
| Doctoral advisor | Eric Keightley Rideal |
| Known for | Norrish reaction |
| Notable awards | Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1967) |
Ronald George Wreyford Norrish FRS (9 November 1897 – 7 June 1978) was a British chemist.[1] He was born in Cambridge, England, and attended The Perse School and Emmanuel College, Cambridge.[2] He was a former student of Eric Rideal. Norrish was a prisoner for part of World War I (1914–1918) and later commented, with sadness, that many of his contemporaries and potential competitors at Cambridge had not survived the War.
Norrish rejoined Emmanuel College as a Research Fellow in 1925 and later became the Head of the Physical Chemistry Department at the University of Cambridge, occupying part of the Lensfield Road Building with the separate department 'Chemistry' (which encompassed organic, theoretical and inorganic chemistry). Both departments had separate administrative, technical and academic personnel until they merged to form one chemistry department under Sir John Meurig Thomas FRS in the early 1980s. Norrish researched photochemistry using continuous light sources (including after the 1945 war, searchlights). As a result of the development of flash photolysis, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1967 along with Manfred Eigen and George Porter for their study of extremely fast chemical reactions.[2] One of his accomplishments is the development of the Norrish reaction.
References
- ^ Frederick Dainton; B. A. Thrush (1981). "Ronald George Wreyford Norrish. 9 November 1897-7 June 1978". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 27: 379–424. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1981.0016. ISSN 0080-4606. JSTOR 769878.
- ^ a b "Ronald George Wreyford Norrish (1897 – 1978)". Emmanuel College, Cambridge. http://www.emma.cam.ac.uk/about/famous/index.cfm?id=12. Retrieved January 25, 2012.
External links
- Norrish's Nobel Foundation biography
- Norrish's Nobel Lecture Some Fast Reactions in Gases Studied by Flash Photolysis and Kinetic Spectroscopy
- List of publications from Microsoft Academic Search.
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