Owen Willans Richardson

In 1906, Richardson married Lilian Maud Wilson, the sister of well-known physicist Harold Wilson, who was also his colleague at the Cavendish Laboratory. The couple had two sons and a daughter. One of them was Harold Owen Richardson who specialized in Nuclear Physics. Lilian died in 1945.

Later in 1948, Richardson married Henriette Rupp, who was also a physicist.

Richardson died on 15 February 1959, in his home in Alton, Hampshire, England.

Owen Willans Richardson was born on 26 April 1879, in Dewsbury, Yorkshire, England. His father, Joshua Henry Richardson, was a salesman in industrial tools. His mother’s name was Charlotte Maria Richardson. He had a sister, Charlotte Sara Richardson, who later married his doctoral student, Clinton Davisson.

Owen Richardson spent his early years near Leeds. Later the family shifted to a small mining town called Askern, located close to Doncaster. There he attended parish school and his performance showed that he was far advanced for his age.

In 1891, he was admitted to Batley Grammar School in Yorkshire on full scholarship, graduating from there in 1897. In the same year, he won the Entrance Major Scholarship and entered Trinity College, Cambridge, with physics, chemistry and botany.

In 1900, Richardson obtained his B.Sc. degree with first class honors in Natural Science, receiving distinction in physics and chemistry. By now, he had come in contact with J. J. Thompson at the Cavendish Laboratory and had become interested in his work on ‘cathode rays’ and subatomic electrical ‘corpuscles’.

In 1900, soon after his graduation, Richardson was invited to stay back at Cambridge. He accepted the offer, choosing to work with Thompson on emission of electricity from hot bodies.

In 1901, he read two scientific papers before the Cambridge Philosophical Society. In one of them, read on 25 November, he established a law governing emission of electricity. It later became well-known as ‘Richardson’s Law’.

These papers made young Richardson quite famous and in 1902 he was elected a Fellow of Trinity College. Much later, he also won the Nobel Prize because of this work.

Meanwhile, he continued his work on the same subject. At the same time, he collaborated with H. A. Wilson and H. O. Jones on other studies in physical and organic chemistry. His works during this period earned him a D.Sc. from the University College London.

In 1906, he left Cavendish Laboratory and joined Princeton University, New Jersey, U.S.A, as Professor of Physics. He remained here until 1914, working mostly on thermionic emission, photoelectric action, and the gyromagnetic effect.

Although Richardson worked on various subjects, he is best known for his work on emission of electricity from hot bodies. In 1901, when he was barely twenty-two years old, he experimentally established that the current from a heated wire depend exponentially on the temperature of the wire with a mathematical form similar to the Arrhenius equation.

In a paper read before the Cambridge Philosophical Society on 25 November 1901 , he announced that, "If then the negative radiation is due to the corpuscles coming out of the metal, the saturation current s should obey the law "s = AT1/2 e-b/T". Later, it became known as Richardson’s law.