Patrick Blackett

In 2016, the house that Blackett lived in from 1953 to 1969 (48 Paultons Square, Chelsea, London) has received an English Heritage Blue Plaque

Blackett was an agnostic or atheist. Blackett had refused many honours in the manner of a radical of the twenties but accepted a Companion of Honour in the 1965 Birthday Honours, and was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1967. He was created a life peer on 27 January 1969 as Baron Blackett, of Chelsea in Greater London. However, the greatest honour of all for him was when he was made President of the Royal Society in 1965. The crater Blackett on the Moon is named after him.

In 1957 Blackett gave the presidential address ("Technology and World Advancement") to the British Association meeting in Dublin. In 1965 he was invited to deliver the MacMillan Memorial Lecture to the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland. He chose the subject "Continental Drift".

Blackett was appointed head of the Physics Department of Imperial College London in 1953 and retired in July 1963. The Physics department building of Imperial College, the Blackett Laboratory is named in his honour.

In 1948 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, for his investigation of cosmic rays using his invention of the counter-controlled cloud chamber.

In 1947, Blackett introduced a theory to account for the Earth's magnetic field as a function of its rotation, with the hope that it would unify both the electromagnetic force and the force of gravity. He spent a number of years developing high-quality magnetometers to test his theory, and eventually found it to be without merit. His work on the subject, however, led him into the field of geophysics, where he eventually helped process data relating to paleomagnetism and helped to provide strong evidence for continental drift.

In August 1940 Blackett became scientific adviser to Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Pile, Commander in Chief of Anti-Aircraft Command and thus began the work that resulted in the field of study known as operational research (OR). He was director of Operational Research with the Admiralty from 1942 to 1945, and his work with E. J. Williams improved the survival odds of convoys, presented counter-intuitive but correct recommendations for the armour-plating of aircraft and achieved many other successes. His aim, he said, was to find numbers on which to base strategy, not gusts of emotion. During the war he criticised the assumptions in Lord Cherwell's dehousing paper and sided with Tizard who argued that fewer resources should go to RAF Bomber Command for the area bombing offensive and more to the other armed forces, as his studies had shown the ineffectiveness of the bombing strategies, as opposed to the importance of fighting of the German U-boats, which were heavily affecting the war effort with their sinkings of merchant ships. In this opinion he chafed against the existing military authority and was cut out of various circles of communications. However, after the war, the Allied Strategic Bombing Survey proved Blackett correct.

That year he moved to Birkbeck, University of London, as professor of Physics for four years. Then in 1937 he went to the Victoria University of Manchester where he was elected to the Langworthy Professorship and created a major international research laboratory. The Blackett Memorial Hall and Blackett lecture theatre at the University of Manchester were named after him.

In 1935 Blackett was invited to join the Aeronautical Research Committee chaired by Sir Henry Tizard. The committee was effective pressing for the early installation of Radar for air defence. In the early part of World War II, Blackett served on various committees and spent time at the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) Farnborough, where he made a major contribution to the design of the Mark XIV bomb sight which allowed bombs to be released without a level bombing run beforehand. In 1940–41 Blackett served on the MAUD Committee which concluded that an atomic bomb was feasible. He disagreed with the committee's conclusion that Britain could produce an atomic bomb by 1943, and recommended that the project should be discussed with the Americans. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1933 and awarded its Royal Medal in 1940.

Rutherford had found out that the nucleus of the nitrogen atom could be disintegrated by firing fast alpha particles into nitrogen. He asked Blackett to use a cloud chamber to find visible tracks of this disintegration, and by 1925, he had taken 23,000 photographs showing 415,000 tracks of ionized particles. Eight of these were forked, and this showed that the nitrogen atom-alpha particle combination had formed an atom of fluorine, which then disintegrated into an isotope of oxygen and a proton. Blackett published the results of his experiments in 1925. He thus became the first person to deliberately transmute one element into another.

Blackett spent some time in 1924–1925 at Göttingen, Germany, working with James Franck on atomic spectra. In 1932, working with Giuseppe Occhialini, he devised a system of Geiger counters which took photographs only when a cosmic ray particle traversed the chamber. They found 500 tracks of high energy cosmic ray particles in 700 automatic exposures. In 1933, Blackett discovered fourteen tracks which confirmed the existence of the positron and revealed the now instantly recognisable opposing spiral traces of positron/electron pair production. This work and that on annihilation radiation made him one of the first and leading experts on anti-matter.

After graduating from Magdalene College in 1921, Blackett spent ten years working at the Cavendish Laboratory as an experimental physicist with Ernest Rutherford and in 1923 became a fellow of King's College, Cambridge, a position he held until 1933.

In August 1914 on the outbreak of World War I Blackett was assigned to active service as a midshipman. He was transferred to the Cape Verde Islands on HMS Carnarvon and was present at the Battle of the Falkland Islands. He was then transferred to HMS Barham and saw much action at the Battle of Jutland. While on HMS Barham, Blackett was co-inventor of a gunnery device on which the Admiralty took out a patent. In 1916 he applied to join the RNAS but his application was refused. In October that year he became a sub-lieutenant on HMS P17 on Dover patrol, and in July 1917 he was posted to HMS Sturgeon in the Harwich Force under Admiral Tyrwhitt. Blackett was particularly concerned by the poor quality of gunnery in the force compared with that of the enemy and of his own previous experience, and started to read science textbooks. He was promoted to lieutenant in May 1918, but had decided to leave the Navy. Then, in January 1919, the Admiralty sent the officers whose training had been interrupted by the war to the University of Cambridge for a course of general duties. On his first night at Magdalene College, Cambridge, he met Kingsley Martin and Geoffrey Webb, later recalling that he had never before, in his naval training, heard intellectual conversation. Blackett was impressed by the prestigious Cavendish Laboratory, and left the Navy to study mathematics and physics at Cambridge.

Blackett married Constanza Bayon (1899–1986) in 1924. They had one son and one daughter. His ashes are buried in the Kensal Green Cemetery, London.

Patrick Blackett was born on November 18, 1897 in Kensington, London, England as Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett.