collageCertain factors are necessary to consider when getting ready for the university or when applying to a school. These factors include Tuition fees, accommodation cost, acceptance rate, school ranking, graduation rate, etc. These factors are necessary in order for you to get acquainted with the school you are applying to. Now, if you are applying to university of manchester, how well do you know the university’s notable alumni ?
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Ernest Rutherford
“ALL SCIENCE IS EITHER PHYSICS OR STAMP COLLECTING.”
We’re sure the name ‘Rutherford’ rings a bell, but if it doesn’t, you’ll certainly be familiar with his greatest achievement – splitting the atom.
Rutherford was a physicist who is reported to have said: “All science is either physics or stamp collecting.” If he did say this, it’s pretty funny – considering he went on to win the Nobel Prize for chemistry.
It was in Manchester that he completed some of his most important work. For years, it was believed that the atom was the smallest particle. His mentor J J Thomson had previously proposed a model of the atom that was made up of negatively charged electrons existing in a positively charged space. Rutherford overturned this with his own model, which put a nucleus at the centre of the atom.
Later, Rutherford successfully split the atom – which led to the discovery of protons – and kick-started the discipline of nuclear physics.
Roy Chadwick
We have so many important engineers among our alumni, like Roy Chadwick. He was the design engineer behind the Arvo Company and instrumental in the design of almost every aeroplane the company produced.
After graduating in 1911, he designed the Arvo Pike twin-engine biplane just four years later. Chadwick accomplished this less than ten years after the first successful flight of a self-propelled aircraft – some feat!
Over the next few years, Chadwick was instrumental or solely responsible for the design of several AVRO aircraft, most notably the Lancaster bomber and the Lincoln. It was while he was working on designs that would become the Vulcan bomber that the plane he was travelling in crashed not long after taking off in an incident that proved to be fatal.
Chadwick’s designs helped to shape the aircraft we have today – and even led to the creation of Concorde. You can visit a retired Concorde at Manchester Airport’s Runway Visitor Park.
Alan Turing
Turing worked with the British Intelligence Service at Bletchley Park during World War II, where he helped to break the notorious German Enigma machine, which was used to cipher military plans. An inability to decipher these coded messages had put countless lives at risk.
Perhaps the most deadly threat was that of the U-boat Enigma. These were the coded messages that allowed the German U-boats to plan torpedo attacks on the ships bringing supplies from America over to the UK. The campaign was so successful that there was real fear the people of Britain would soon starve.
Cracking these codes meant Turing and his team could alert the ships, allowing them to make their way safely to the UK. There are many who say that Turing was one of the key figures to help bring the war to an end.
And why stop there? Alan Turing is also known as the father of modern computing. Here at Manchester, he worked on the first stored-program computer and also developed the Turing test. With a list of achievements like this, it’s no wonder there’s a statue of him, in Sackville Gardens (pictured).
Beatrice Shilling
Another one of our graduates who changed the course of World War II was Beatrice Shilling. In 1929, she was one of just two female students to enrol on our Electrical Engineering degree.
Known for her sense of humour, Shilling graduated in 1933 from her degree and Master’s. She started working for the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) in 1936, and it was while here that she invented something that would help to change the course of World War II.
When engaged in dogfights with the Luftwaffe, RAF fighter pilots were experiencing a significant problem. If the German pilots pitched their craft in a hard nosedive, the negative G-force the Spitfire and Hurricane pilots experienced following the manoeuvre would cause the engine to stall. This meant the Luftwaffe could elude the Allies by using this move.
Working with her team at RAE, Shilling invented the RAE restrictor. This simple invention was designed to be placed in the carburettors of the aircraft engines, where it stopped the engines from flooding when the planes went into a nosedive. It’s little surprise that Shilling was awarded an OBE for her wartime work.
Brian Cox
We’re sure you’ve heard of one of the University of Manchester’s more recent graduates, Brian Cox. He completed his PhD in high-energy particle physics here in 1997, using research he conducted on an experiment completed by the Hadron Elektron Ring Anlage particle accelerator in Germany.
Cox also worked on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. ATLAS was one of the experiments that discovered and confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson – or ‘God Particle’. It earned its nickname for being important but hard to prove.
Since then, Cox has carved out a career in science communication and has presented several TV series on physics and astrophysics for the BBC. He is a regular visitor to UoM, so don’t be surprised if you bump into him at one of our science events.
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