Patrick Blackett

He married Costanza Bayon, a modern language student, in March, 1924. He had a daughter named Giovanna and a son named Nichols from this marriage.

Patrick Blackett died in London, UK on July 13, 1974.

A crater on the moon is named after him and the house where he lived from 1953 to 1969 was given an ‘English Heritage Blue Plaque’.

Patrick Blackett was born as Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett in Kensington, London, UK on November 18, 1897. His father was a stockbroker named Arthur Stuart Blackett and his mother was Caroline Maynard. He had a younger sister named Marion.

He attended a military preparatory school called the ‘Osborne Royal Naval College’ in 1910 from where he matriculated in 1912 and then joined the ‘Dartmouth Royal Naval College’.

He joined the Royal Navy and saw action in the ‘Battle of Falklands’ in 1914 and in the ‘Battle of Jutland’ in 1916 during the First World War.

He joined the ‘Magdalene College’ under the ‘Cambridge University’ in January, 1919, to complete his studies which had been interrupted in 1914. He resigned from the Navy in the same year.

He received his undergraduate degree from the ‘Magdalene College’ in 1921 and joined as a research post-graduate student the ‘Cavendish Laboratory’ under the ‘Cambridge University’ whose director was physicist Ernest Rutherford.

Patrick Blackett became famous in 1924 at the age of twenty-seven for being able to take photographs of the ionized particles inside the ‘cloud chamber’ just when the expansion of the content inside it expanded with the help of a trigger invented by him.

From 1924 to 1925 he worked with James Franck at Gottingen, Germany.

He redesigned the ‘cloud chamber’ with the help of an Italian physicist named Giuseppe Occhialini in 1932 by adding a ‘Geiger counter’ which would trigger the photography mechanism whenever a particle passed through it for which he would win the Nobel Prize in Physics later.

He moved to the ‘Birkbeck College’ in London in 1933 as a Professor of Physics where he studied subatomic particles extensively and narrowly missed the credit for discovering ‘positron’.

In 1934 he joined the ‘Aeronautical Research Committee’ of the government as an adviser, and then the ‘Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defense (CSSAD)’ of the Air Ministry. While there he suggested the concept of field research or ‘operational research’ for effectively integrating radar technology with combat operations.

Patrick Blackett published his book ‘The Ejection of Protons from Nitrogen Nuclei, photographed by the Wilson method’ in 1925, ‘Some Photographs of the Tracks of Penetrating Radiation’ in 1933 and ‘The Craft of Experimental Physics’ also in 1933.

He brought out the book ‘Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy’ in 1948.

His book ‘A Negative Experiment Relating to Magnetism and the Earth’s Rotation’ was published in 1952 while the book ‘Comparison of Ancient Climates with the Ancient Latitudes Deduced from Rock Magnetic Data’ came out in 1961.