Henry Moseley - Biography

Biography

Henry Gwyn Jeffreys Moseley was born in Weymouth, Dorset, on the south coast of England in 1887. His father Henry Nottidge Moseley (1844 – 91), who died when Henry Moseley was quite young, was a biologist and also a professor of anatomy and physiology at the University of Oxford, who had been a member of the Challenger Expedition. Moseley's mother was Amabel Gwyn Jeffreys Moseley, who was the daughter of the biologist and conchologist John Gwyn Jeffreys.

Henry Moseley had been a very promising schoolboy at Summer Fields School (where one of the four 'leagues' is named after him), and he was awarded a King's scholarship to attend Eton College. In 1906, Moseley entered Trinity College of the University of Oxford, where he earned his bachelor's degree. Immediately after graduation from Oxford in 1910, Moseley became a demonstrator in physics at the University of Manchester under the supervision of Sir Ernest Rutherford. During Moseley's first year at Manchester, he had a teaching load as a graduate teaching assistant, but following that first year, he was reassigned from his teaching duties to work as a graduate research assistant.