Henry Gwyn Jeffreys Moseley

After swotting up on the periodic table recently, I became interested in Henry Moseley. (With a second name such as Gwyn, he must have been at least a bit Welsh!). Various sources credit him with being the first person to arrange the Periodic Table in order of Atomic Number, instead of Relative Atomic Mass.

However, what also caught my eye was his life story. It seems that he enlisted in the army in 1914, and fought at Gallipoli, where he was killed in action by a sniper in 1915. He was only 27. What a tragic loss.

I'll Quote some bits of the Wikipedia entry here: -

In 1913, by using x-ray spectra obtained by diffraction in crystals, he found a systematic relation between wavelength and atomic number, Moseley's law. Previous to this, atomic numbers had been thought of as an arbitrary number, based on sequence of atomic weights, but altered when necessary (for example, by Dmitri Mendeleev) to put an element in the appropriate place in the periodic table. Moseley's discovery showed that atomic numbers were not arbitrary but had an experimentally measurable basis. In addition, Moseley showed that there were gaps in the sequence at numbers 43, 61 and 75 (now known to be radioactive, non-naturally-occurring, technetium and promethium, and the last discovered naturally-occurring element rhenium, respectively). Mendeleev had previously predicted technetium, and Bohuslav Brauner had previously predicted promethium; Moseley confirmed their predictions, predicted one additional undiscovered element, and showed there were no other gaps in the periodic table between aluminum and gold.

In 1914 he resigned at Manchester to return to Oxford to pursue his research, but when World War I broke out, he turned down a job offer and enlisted in the Royal Engineers. He fought at Gallipoli, where he was killed in action by a sniper in 1915. Many have since speculated that he could have won the Nobel Prize, but was unable to because it is only awarded to the living.

Only twenty-seven years old at death, Moseley could in many scientists' opinions have contributed much to the knowledge of atomic structure had he lived. As Niels Bohr once said in 1962, "You see actually the Rutherford work [the nuclear atom] was not taken seriously. We cannot understand today, but it was not taken seriously at all. There was no mention of it any place. The great change came from Moseley." It is speculated that because of Moseley's death in the War that the British government no longer allowed their scientists to enlist in combat.

How sad.