It appears that I was born in hospital in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada on July 15, 1918. My first memories are of a farm near Milk River where I lived with my mother and father and my sister, Alice Evelyn, and a variety of farm and domestic animals. My father, Israel Bertram Brockhouse, had homesteaded with…

Cecil Frank Powell was born on December 5th, 1903, at Tonbridge, Kent, where his father, Frank Powell, was one of a family of gunsmiths who had long practised the trade in the town. His grandfather, George Bisacre, had established a private school in the nearby town of Southborough and his family ties and influences therefore…

I was born November 28, 1950 in New York City, the son of Alan and Betty Joan Hulse. My parents tell me that I quickly showed an unusual level of curiosity about the world around me as a child, and that this transformed itself into an interest in science at a very early age. For…

Rudolf Ludwig Mössbauer was born in Munich on the 31st of January 1929, the son of Ludwig Mössbauer and his wife Erna, née Ernst. He was educated at the “Oberschule” (non-classical secondary school) in Munich-Pasing and left after matriculating in I948. After working for one year in industrial laboratories, he started reading physics at the…

Guglielmo Marconi was born at Bologna, Italy, on April 25, 1874, the second son of Giuseppe Marconi, an Italian country gentleman, and Annie Jameson, daughter of Andrew Jameson of Daphne Castle in the County Wexford, Ireland. He was educated privately at Bologna, Florence and Leghorn. Even as a boy he took a keen interest in…

Max Born was born in Breslau on the 11th December, 1882, to Professor Gustav Born, anatomist and embryologist, and his wife Margarete, née Kauffmann, who was a member of a Silesian family of industrialists. Max attended the König Wilhelm’s Gymnasium in Breslau and continued his studies at the Universities of Breslau (where the well-known mathematician…

Karl Ferdinand Braun was born on June 6, 1850 at Fulda, where he was educated at the local “Gymnasium” (grammar school). He studied at the Universities of Marburg and Berlin and graduated in 1872 with a paper on the oscillations of elastic strings. He worked as assistant to Professor Quincke at Würzburg University and in…

Walther Bothe was born on January 8, 1891, at Oranienburg, near Berlin. From 1908 until 1912 he studied physics at the University of Berlin, where he was a pupil of , obtaining his doctorate just before the outbreak of the 1914-1918 war. From 1913 until 1930 he worked at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt in the same…

I was born in Nagoya, Japan on April 7, 1944. As it was in the middle of the Second World War, I was evacuated to Kawagoe Village in Mie Prefecture the following year to escape the aerial bombardment over Nagoya. Soon after the war ended, my father passed away. As I was only two years…

Johannes Diderik van der Waals was born on November 23, 1837 in Leyden, The Netherlands, the son of Jacobus van der Waals and Elisabeth van den Burg. After having finished elementary education at his birthplace he became a schoolteacher. Although he had no knowledge of classical languages, and thus was not allowed to take academic…