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Henry Moseley

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Scientist

The Resume

    (November 23, 1887-August 10, 1915)
    Born in Weymouth, Dorset, England, United Kingdom
    Physicist
    Found a relationship between the atomic number of an element and the wavelength of the x-ray emitted by the element
    Killed by a sniper during the Battle of Gallipoli

Why he might be annoying:

    He was disappointed at earning only a second class degree in physics at Oxford instead of the first he had expected.
    In his letters home from the front, he kvetched about his fellow soldiers and accused them of stealing his shaving razors.
    His death in battle was an appalling waste of potential.
    Ernest Rutherford wrote, ‘To use such a man as a subaltern is economically equivalent to using the Lusitania to carry a pound of butter from Ramsgate to Margate.’

Why he might not be annoying:

    His experiments provided the first evidence that atomic numbers reflected a property of atoms and weren’t just a convenience for reordering the periodic table when ordering by atomic weights produced anomalies.
    He provided experimental support for the atomic models of Niels Bohr and Ernest Rutherford.
    He correctly predicted the existence of four new elements, corresponding to atomic numbers 43, 61, 72, and 75.
    After his death, the British War Office adopted a policy of not sending promising young scientists into combat.
    It was speculated that if he had lived, he would have been a shoe-in for a Nobel Prize in Physics, probably in either 1916 (when no Prize was awarded) or 1917 (when he would have shared with Charles Barkla, who had also researched how elements absorbed and emitted x-rays).

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    In 2023, Out of 3 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 8 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 126 Votes: 54.76% Annoying