biography
| name: |
Cockcroft, Sir John Douglas
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1897–1967)
|
| biography:
| Nuclear physicist, born in Todmorden, West Yorkshire, N England, UK. He studied at Manchester and Cambridge, and became professor of physics at Cambridge (1939–46). With Walton he succeeded in disintegrating lithium by proton bombardment (the first artificial transmutation) in 1932, pioneering the use of particle accelerators, and they shared the Nobel Prize for Physics (1951). During World War 2 he was director of Air Defence Research (1941–4). He became the first director of Britain's Atomic Energy Establishment at Harwell in 1946. He was knighted in 1948, and in 1959 appointed the first Master of Churchill College, Cambridge. |
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