Henry Tizard
| Henry Tizard | |
|---|---|
| Born |
23 August 1885 Gillingham, Medway, Kent |
| Died | 9 October 1959 (aged 74) Fareham, Hampshire |
| Residence | English |
| Fields | chemistry |
| Notable awards |
Albert Medal (1944) Fellow of the Royal Society |
Sir Henry Thomas Tizard FRS (23 August 1885 – 9 October 1959) was an English chemist, inventor and Rector of Imperial College, who developed the modern "octane rating" used to classify petrol, helped develop radar in World War II, and led the first serious studies of UFOs.
Tizard was born in Gillingham, Medway, Kent in 1885. His ambition to join the navy was thwarted by poor eyesight, and he instead studied at Westminster School and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he concentrated on mathematics and chemistry, doing work on indicators and the motions of ions in gases in 1911.
Tizard was married on 24 April 1915 to Kathleen Eleanor (d. 1968), daughter of Arthur Prangley Wilson, a mining engineer. They had three sons: (John) Peter Mills Tizard, who became a professor of paediatrics at the University of London; Richard Henry Tizard (1917–2005), an engineer and senior tutor at Churchill College, Cambridge; and David (b. 1922), a general practitioner in London.
"The secret of science", he once said, "is to ask the right question, and it is the choice of problem more than anything else that marks the man of genius in the scientific world." Tizard's chosen problem became aeronautics. At the outbreak of the First World War he joined first the Royal Garrison Artillery (where his training methods were famously bizarre) and then the Royal Flying Corps, where he became experimental equipment officer and learned to fly planes after his eyesight improved. He acted as his own test pilot for making aerodynamical observations. When his superior Bertram Hopkinson was moved to the Ministry of Munitions, Tizard went with him. When Hopkinson died in 1918, Tizard took over his post. Tizard served in the Royal Air Force from 1918 to 1919.
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