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John Cockcroft

British physicist (1897–1967)

Sir John Douglas Cockcroft (27 May 1897 – 18 September 1967) was a British experimental physicist who shared the 1951 Nobel Prize in Physics with Ernest Walton for their splitting of the atomic nucleus, which led to the development of nuclear power and weapons. After service on the Western Front with the Royal Field Artillery during the Great War, Cockcroft studied electrical engineering at Manchester Municipal College of Technology whilst he was an apprentice at Metropolitan Vickers Trafford Park and was also a member of their research staff.

He then won a scholarship to St John's College, Cambridge, where he sat the Tripos exam in June 1924, becoming a Wrangler. Ernest Rutherford accepted Cockcroft as a research student in the Cavendish Laboratory, and Cockcroft completed his doctorate under Rutherford's supervision in 1928. With Walton and Mark Oliphant, he built what became known as a Cockcroft–Walton generator. Cockcroft and Walton used this to perform the first artificial disintegration of an atomic nucleus, a feat popularly known as "splitting the atom." During the Second World War, Cockcroft became assistant director of scientific research in the Ministry of Supply, working on radar. He was also a member of the committee formed to handle issues arising from the Frisch–Peierls memorandum, which calculated that an atomic bomb could be technically feasible, and of the MAUD Committee which succeeded it. In 1940, as part of the Tizard Mission, he shared British technology with his counterparts in the United States. Later in the war, the fruits of the Tizard Mission came back to Britain in the form of the SCR-584 radar set and the proximity fuze, which were used to help defeat the V-1 flying bomb.

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