Andrade, Edward Neville da Costa

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ANDRADE, EDWARD NEVILLE DA COSTA

ANDRADE, EDWARD NEVILLE DA COSTA (1887–1971), British physicist and author, who established "Andrade's Laws," concerning the flow of metals. Andrade was born and educated in London, and graduated from University College. He worked in Manchester with Rutherford, measuring the wavelength of gamma rays. In 1935 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He served as an artillery officer in World War i and after the war became professor of physics at the Artillery College, Woolwich, and later head of the physics department of University College, London. In 1950 he was appointed director of the Royal Institution and of its Davy-Faraday Research Laboratory. He resigned in 1952 after basic differences with the governing body. He carried out research at the Imperial College of Science on the electrical properties of flames and on radioactivity, and on the viscosity of liquids (here, too, a law bears his name). He was a noted historian of science, with special interest in Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke. His books, both scientific and popular, include Structure of the Atom (1923), The Mechanism of Nature (1930), The Atom and Its Energy (1947), Sir Isaac Newton (1954), Physics for the Modern World (1963), Rutherford and the Nature of the Atom (1964), and Poems and Songs (1949).

[Samuel Aaron Miller]

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