Early Life
John Frank Davidson was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, the industrial center of the county of Northumberland. His school years (1937–1944) fell on severe days of World War II. In 1944, he entered the University of Cambridge, with which all his further life has been associated. After receiving the degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1947, Davidson joined Rolls Royce, Derby, where he served two and a half years in the Mechanical Development Department. Having returned in 1950 to Cambridge, he became a graduate student in the Engineering Department (1950–1952). At the end of 1952, he passed to the recently founded Department of Chemical Engineering of the University of Cambridge. In that period, Davidson began to theoretically study the motion of large gas bubbles in liquids and wrote his still widely cited works on the mass transfer between a bubble and a liquid flowing past it. However, what is more important, these studies stimulated him to carry out a number of pioneering works on fluidization, which were generalized in his book Fluidised Particles(1963), coauthored with David Harrison (later, this book was translated into Russian). This was one of the first books on fluidization, and it generated keen interest.
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