Henry Moseley - Death and Aftermath

Death and Aftermath

Sometime in the first half of 1914, Moseley resigned from his position at Manchester, with plans to return to Oxford and continue his physics research there. However, World War I broke out in August 1914, and Moseley turned down this job offer to enlist in the Royal Engineers of the British Army instead. Moseley served as a technical officer in communications during the Battle of Gallipoli, in Turkey, beginning in April 1915, where he was killed in action on 10 August 1915. Moseley was shot in the head by a Turkish sniper while in the act of telephoning a military order. Isaac Asimov once wrote, "In view of what he might still have accomplished ... his death might well have been the most costly single death of the War to mankind generally." Because of Moseley's death in World War I, the British government instituted a policy of no longer allowing its prominent and promising scientists to enlist for combat duty in the armed forces of the Crown.

Isaac Asimov has also speculated that in the event that he had not been killed while in the service of the British Empire, Moseley might very well have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1916, which was not awarded to anyone that year (along with the prize for Chemistry). Additional credence is given to this by noting who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in the two previous years, 1914 and 1915, and in the following year, 1917. In 1914, Max von Laue of Germany won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the diffraction of X-rays by crystals, which was a crucial step towards the invention of X-ray spectroscopy. Then, in 1915, William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg, a British father-son pair, shared this Nobel Prize for their discoveries in the reverse problem - determining the structure of crystals using X-rays. Next, Moseley used the diffraction of X-rays by known crystals in measuring the X-ray spectra of metals. This was the first use of X-ray spectroscopy and also one more step towards the creation of X-ray crystallography. In addition, Moseley's methods and analyses made the huge step of placing the concept of atomic number on a firm foundation based in physics. On top of all of this, Charles Barkla of Great Britain was awarded this Nobel Prize in 1917 for his experimental work in using X-ray spectroscopy in discovering the characteristic X-ray frequencies emitted by the various elements, especially the metals. Moseley's discoveries were thus of the same scope as those of his peers, and in addition, Moseley made the larger step of demonstrating the actual foundation of atomic numbers.

Only twenty-seven years old at his death, Moseley could in many scientists' opinions have contributed a lot to the knowledge of atomic structure had he survived. As Niels Bohr once said in 1962, "You see actually the Rutherford work 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."