The Cavendish Laboratory is the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge, and is part of the School of Physical Sciences. The laboratory was opened in 1874 on the New Museums Site as a laboratory for experimental physics and is named after the British chemist and physicist Henry Cavendish. The laboratory has had a huge influence on research in the disciplines of physics and biology.
The laboratory moved to its present site in West Cambridge in 1974.
As of 2019[update], 30 Cavendish researchers have won Nobel Prizes.[2] Notable discoveries to have occurred at the Cavendish Laboratory include the discovery of the electron, neutron, and structure of DNA.
Founding
The Cavendish Laboratory was initially located on the New Museums Site, Free School Lane, in the centre of Cambridge. It is named after British chemist and physicist Henry Cavendish[3][4] for contributions to science[5] and his relative William Cavendish, 7th Duke of Devonshire, who served as chancellor of the university and donated funds for the construction of the laboratory.[6]
Professor James Clerk Maxwell, the developer of electromagnetic theory, was a founder of the laboratory and the first Cavendish Professor of Physics.[7] The Duke of Devonshire had given to Maxwell, as head of the laboratory, the manuscripts of Henry Cavendish's unpublished Electrical Works. The editing and publishing of these was Maxwell's main scientific work while he was at the laboratory. Cavendish's work aroused Maxwell's intense admiration and he decided to call the Laboratory (formerly known as the Devonshire Laboratory) the Cavendish Laboratory and thus to commemorate both the Duke and Henry Cavendish.[8][9]
Ernest Rutherford became Director of the Cavendish Laboratory in 1919. Under his leadership the neutron was discovered by James Chadwick in 1932, and in the same year the first experiment to split the nucleus in a fully controlled manner was performed by students working under his direction; John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton.
Physical chemistry
Physical Chemistry (originally the department of Colloid Science led by Eric Rideal) had left the old Cavendish site, subsequently locating as the Department of Physical Chemistry (under RG Norrish) in the then new chemistry building with the Department of Chemistry (led by Lord Todd) in Lensfield Road: both chemistry departments merged in the 1980s.
The Cavendish Laboratory has had an important influence on biology, mainly through the application of X-ray crystallography to the study of structures of biological molecules. Francis Crick already worked in the Medical Research Council Unit, headed by Max Perutz[10][11] and housed in the Cavendish Laboratory, when James Watson came from the United States and they made a breakthrough in discovering the structure of DNA. For their work while in the Cavendish Laboratory, they were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962, together with Maurice Wilkins of King's College London, himself a graduate of St. John's College, Cambridge.
The discovery was made on 28 February 1953; the first Watson/Crick paper appeared in Nature on 25 April 1953. Sir Lawrence Bragg, the director of the Cavendish Laboratory, where Watson and Crick worked, gave a talk at Guy's Hospital Medical School in London on Thursday 14 May 1953 which resulted in an article by Ritchie Calder in the News Chronicle of London, on Friday 15 May 1953, entitled "Why You Are You. Nearer Secret of Life." The news reached readers of The New York Times the next day; Victor K. McElheny, in researching his biography, Watson and DNA: Making a Scientific Revolution, found a clipping of a six-paragraph New York Times article written from London and dated 16 May 1953 with the headline "Form of `Life Unit' in Cell Is Scanned." The article ran in an early edition and was then pulled to make space for news deemed more important. (The New York Times subsequently ran a longer article on 12 June 1953). The Cambridge University undergraduate newspaper Varsity also ran its own short article on the discovery on Saturday 30 May 1953. Bragg's original announcement of the discovery at a Solvay Conference on proteins in Belgium on 8 April 1953 went unreported by the British press.
Sydney Brenner, Jack Dunitz, Dorothy Hodgkin, Leslie Orgel, and Beryl M. Oughton, were some of the first people in April 1953 to see the model of the structure of DNA, constructed by Crick and Watson; at the time they were working at the University of Oxford's Chemistry Department. All were impressed by the new DNA model, especially Brenner who subsequently worked with Crick at Cambridge in the Cavendish Laboratory and the new Laboratory of Molecular Biology. According to the late Dr. Beryl Oughton, later Rimmer, they all travelled together in two cars once Dorothy Hodgkin announced to them that they were off to Cambridge to see the model of the structure of DNA.[12] Orgel also later worked with Crick at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
Present site
Due to overcrowding in the old buildings, it moved to its present site in West Cambridge in the early 1970s.[13] It is due to move again to a third site currently under construction in West Cambridge.[14]
^Fersht, A. R. (2002). "Max Ferdinand Perutz OM FRS". Nature Structural Biology. 9 (4): 245–246. doi:10.1038/nsb0402-245. PMID 11914731.
^Olby, Robert, Francis Crick: Hunter of Life's Secrets, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2009, Chapter 10, p. 181 ISBN 978-0-87969-798-3
^"West Cambridge Site Location of the Cavendish Laboratory on the University map". Archived from the original on 25 February 2017. Retrieved 12 July 2014.
^"Cavendish III – Department of Physics". www.phy.cam.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 12 July 2019. Retrieved 29 July 2019.
^Amos, L.; Finch, J. T. (2004). "Aaron Klug and the revolution in biomolecular structure determination". Trends in Cell Biology. 14 (3): 148–152. doi:10.1016/j.tcb.2004.01.002. PMID 15003624.
^ a b"FRIEND, Sir Richard (Henry)". Who's Who. Vol. 2015 (online Oxford University Press ed.). A & C Black. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
^"Quantum Matter group". Archived from the original on 18 June 2008. Retrieved 16 June 2008.
^Gilbert George Lonzarich's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
^"Theory of Condensed Matter group". Archived from the original on 11 August 2015. Retrieved 27 July 2015.
^"Electron Microscopy Group". Archived from the original on 25 March 2013. Retrieved 6 August 2013.
^"Semiconductor Physics Group". Archived from the original on 8 October 2003. Retrieved 16 June 2008.
^"AMOP group". Archived from the original on 27 April 2013. Retrieved 2 March 2013.
^"Nanophotonics Group". Archived from the original on 15 February 2013. Retrieved 2 March 2013.
^"Structure and Dynamics Group". Archived from the original on 24 November 2015. Retrieved 22 November 2018.
^"Laboratory for Scientific Computing". Archived from the original on 23 March 2013. Retrieved 2 March 2013.
^"Biological and Soft Systems". Archived from the original on 14 February 2021. Retrieved 5 February 2021.
^ a b"Academic staff at the Cavendish Laboratory". University of Cambridge. Archived from the original on 12 October 2014.
Further reading
Longair, Malcolm (2016). Maxwell's Enduring Legacy: A Scientific History of the Cavendish Laboratory. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-08369-1.
External links
Media related to Cavendish Laboratory at Wikimedia Commons
Austin Memories—History of Austin and Longbridge Cavendish Article