Owen Richardson
| Sir Owen Richardson | |
|---|---|
Niels Bohr and Richardson (right) at the 1927 Solvay conference
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| Born | Owen Willans Richardson 26 April 1879 Dewsbury, Yorkshire, England |
| Died | 15 February 1959 (aged 79) Alton, Hampshire, England |
| Nationality | United Kingdom |
| Fields | Physics |
| Institutions | |
| Education | Batley Grammar School |
| Alma mater | |
| Doctoral advisor | J. J. Thomson |
| Doctoral students | |
| Known for | Richardson's law |
| Notable awards |
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Sir Owen Willans Richardson, FRS (26 April 1879 – 15 February 1959) was a British physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1928 for his work on thermionic emission, which led to Richardson's law.
Richardson was born in Dewsbury, Yorkshire, England, the only son of Joshua Henry and Charlotte Maria Richardson. He was educated at Batley Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he gained First Class Honours in Natural Sciences. He then got a DSc from University of London in 1904.
After graduating in 1900, he began researching the emission of electricity from hot bodies at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, and in 1902 he was made a fellow at Trinity. In 1901, he demonstrated that the current from a heated wire seemed to depend exponentially on the temperature of the wire with a mathematical form similar to the Arrhenius equation. This became known as Richardson's law: "If then the negative radiation is due to the corpuscles coming out of the metal, the saturation current s should obey the law ."
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