Professor Francis Aston, c mid-20th century

Francis William Aston, born 1 September 1877, in Harborne, Birmingham. He died 20 November 1945. Aston was a British chemist and physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1922 for his discovery of isotopes in many non-radioactive elements. He studied at Mason College in 1893. He then undertook research with the University of Birmingham on a scholarship following the discovery of X-rays and radioactivity in the mid-1908s. He travelled around the world in 1908, and then was appointed a professorship at the University of Birmingham in 1909. However, he moved to the Cavendish Laboratory in 1910 on the invite of J. J. Thomson. During WWI, he worked for the Royal Aircraft Establishment. Aston was an avid sportsman, partaking in cross-country skiing and skating, as well as climbing and cycling. He further swam and golfed with his colleagues at Cambridge, winning prizes in open tennis tournaments, and learnt to surf in Honolulu in 1919. He was also musically talented, able to play the piano, violin, and cello, and regularly held concerts at Cambridge. He never married or had children. He died in 1945, aged 68.