Charles Galton Darwin - Career

Career

He secured a post-graduate position at the Victoria University of Manchester, working under Ernest Rutherford and Niels Bohr on Rutherford's atomic theory. In 1912, his interests developed into using his mathematical skills assisting Henry Moseley on X-ray diffraction. His two 1914 papers on diffraction of X-rays from perfect crystals became often cited classics.

On the outbreak of World War I, he joined the Royal Engineers, where he worked on problems in ballistics. From 1919 to 1922 he was a lecturer and fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge where he worked with R.H. Fowler on statistical mechanics and, what came to be known as, the Darwin–Fowler method. He then worked for a year at the California Institute of Technology before becoming Tait Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh in 1924, working on quantum optics and magneto-optic effects. He was the first in 1928, to calculate the fine structure of the hydrogen atom under P.A.M. Dirac's relativistic theory of the electron.

In 1936 Darwin became master of Christ's College, beginning his career as an active and able administrator, becoming director of the National Physical Laboratory on the approach of war in 1938. He served in the role into the post-war period, unafraid to seek improved laboratory performance through re-organisation, but spending much of the war years working on the Manhattan Project coordinating the American, British, and Canadian efforts.

He was appointed KBE in 1942.