Manchester Science, Discovery & Exploration

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George Mallory

George Leigh Mallory

(1886-1924)
When in March 1923, in an interview with The New York Times, the British mountaineer George Mallory was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, and replied with his now famous response: 'Because it's there'. He could have had no notion that he and fellow-climber Andrew Irvine, would die on the mountain the following year.

George Leigh Mallory was born on 18 June 1886 in Mobberley, Cheshire, the son of a clergyman, and one of four children Mary, George, Victoria and Trafford (who later became Sir Trafford Leigh Mallory, Air Vice-Marshall in the Royal Air Force). Mallory went to preparatory school in West Kirby, and boarding school in Eastbourne in 1896. At the age of 14, George won a mathematics scholarship to Winchester College and soon developed a passion for climbing in the Alps. After Winchester he went to Cambridge where he captained the Magdalene College rowing eight in the 1909 season. Here he became associated with the Bloomsbury group and met the likes of Rupert Brooke, H G Wells, James and Lytton Strachey, and Maynard and Geoffrey Keynes. Mallory graduated from Cambridge in 1909 and spent the following summer walking in the Lake District accompanied by his former tutor, Arthur Benson.

By 1913 Mallory was teaching at Charterhouse School, near Godalming, and in July 1914 he was married to Ruth Turner.

In August 1914, at the outbreak of war, Mallory enlisted to serve on the Western Front in France, but was soon invalided home. After the war he was a lecturer in Cambridge University's Extra-Mural Department.

But mountaineering was clearly his first love and he took part in three attempts to climb Mount Everest in the Himalayas in 1924, and was leader in the fatal Everest expedition of that year.

During this climb, he and his partner, Sandy Irvine, were lost, and never seen alive again. It was not until 1999, when American climber Conrad Anker found Mallory's frozen body on the mountain at 26,760 feet. It's clothes were in tatters, but the label was clearly marked with Mallory's name; the whereabouts of Irvine's body, however, has not yet been discovered.

The discovery has reopened the debate as to whether or not Mallory or Irvine had ever reached the summit of Everest, or could be said to be the first to reach its peak - that distinction still rests officially with the June 1953 expedition led by Sir John Hunt and the ascent made by Sir Edmund Hilary and Sherpa Norkay Tensing.

Sir Joseph James Thomson

(1856-1940)
Joseph James Thomson (later known simply as 'JJ') was one of the nation's leading physicists and is principally remembered for the discovery of the electron and for his work on gaseous exchanges.

Born in Cheetham Hill on the 18th December 1856 of a father (also Joseph James Thomson), who was an antiquarian bookseller and publisher and his mother Emma Thomson of the Vernon family who owned a local cotton spinning company. Thomson enrolled at Owens College in Manchester in 1871 (now the University of Manchester) to read engineering, mathematics, physics and chemistry.

In 1876 won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge from where he graduated in 1880. Remaining to carry out research at Cambridge he was made a Fellow of Trinity in 1880 and began experimental work at the Cavendish Laboratory under Lord Rayleigh
Thomson was appointed a Lecturer at Trinity College in 1883 and in 1884 he succeeded Lord Rayleigh as Professor of Experimental Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory. In 1884 Thomson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1890 he married Rose Paget, daughter of Sir George Paget, Regius Professor of Physic at Cambridge.

His work began to attract many brilliant young men including Rutherford, Townsend and McClelland. His work on electric discharge through gases was groundbreaking, but it was his discovery of the electron in 1897 for which he is best known. This discovery opened up the field of subatomic physics to experimental investigation. In 1905 Thomson worked on cathode rays and in 1912 his team discovered isotopes of neon, the first non-radioactive isotopes to be identified.

During the World War I he was advisor an important government adviser and a member of the Board of Invention and Research, which had been set up in 1915 by Arthur Balfour, then First Lord of the Admiralty. He received many prestigious awards for his work, including several Royal Society medals (in 1894, 1902, 1914 and 1915), and was President of the Society from 1915 to 1920. In 1906 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics, was knighted in 1908 and awarded the Order of Merit in 1912.

He was also made honorary member of the Royal Society of Medicine in 1919, as well as other honours from the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia in 1922 and the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1925. He was also made President of the Junior Institution of Electrical Engineers in 1910 and Honorary Professor of Physics at the Royal Institution. Amongst his many honorary degrees were those from Oxford, Göttingen, Oslo, Dublin, St Andrews, Athens and Baltimore.

Thomson had two children, George Paget Thomson, (who was himself awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1937) and Joan Paget Thomson.

J.J.Thomson died on the 30th August 1940.

Sir Arnold Wolfendale

(Born 1927)
Arnold Wolfendale, born in Flixton, (now in the Borough of Trafford) on 25th June 1927, the son of Arnold and Doris Wolfendale.

Studying at the the University of Manchester he was awarded a First Class Honours BSc degree in Physics in 1948 was followed by a PhD in 1953. In 1951 he married Audrey Darby, and they have twin sons. In 1956 he began work with the Home Office, and was associated with that department until 1984, working in areas of Civil Defence and later as a Scientific adviser. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1973 and of the Royal Society in 1977.

Sir Arnold's career has included lecturing posts at the Universities of Manchester, Durham, Ceylon and Hong Kong. He was head of department at Durham University, where he has spent the most part of his professional life and from where he has published on a range of topics including cosmic rays and their origin, gamma rays, solar and geomagnetic variation and cosmology. He retired from teaching in 1992 and was knighted in 1995.
From 1991 to 1995 he was 14th Astronomer Royal and worked on promoting astronomy and campaigning for better funding for all the sciences.

Since 1996 he has been Professor of Experimental Physics with the Royal Institution of Great Britain. He has given lectures in many countries and in many places, and has had several books published on the subject of cosmic rays and astrophysics.

He is Emeritus professor of physics at the University of Durham, where he currently lives.