John Cockcroft

Sir John Douglas Cockcroft OM KCB CBE FRS (27 May 1897 – 18 September 1967) was a British physicist. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for splitting the atomic nucleus with Ernest Walton, and was instrumental in the development of nuclear power. Cockcroft was born in Todmorden, England the eldest son of a mill owner. He was educated at Todmorden Secondary School (1909–1914) (where his physics teacher, Luke Sutcliffe, would later tutor another future Nobel Prize-winner, Geoffrey Wilkinson) and studied mathematics at the Victoria University of Manchester (1914–1915). He was a signaller in the Royal Artillery from 1915 to 1918. After the war ended, he studied electrotechnical engineering at Manchester College of Technology from 1919...