Arthur Schuster
Schuster, Arthur (1851-1934) was a German-born British physicist. He contributed to the discovery of the electron. He suggested that the conducting power of the upper atmosphere of the earth is caused by ultraviolet rays from the sun.
Schuster was born on Sept. 12, 1851, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. His family moved to Manchester, England, in 1869, and Schuster became a naturalized citizen of the United Kingdom in 1875.
Schuster studied at the Geneva Academy in Switzerland from 1868 to 1870 and at Owens College in Manchester from 1871 to 1872. He then went to the University of Heidelberg in Germany, where he earned a Ph.D. degree in 1873. He studied at the universities in Göttingen and Berlin in Germany in 1874 before returning to Manchester to work in Owens College's new physics laboratory for one semester.
In 1875, Schuster led an expedition to Siam (now Thailand) to observe a solar eclipse. The expedition was sponsored by the Royal Society, the leading scientific organization in the United Kingdom. Schuster was elected to membership in the Royal Society in 1879. He later received three of the society's most important awards: the Royal medal (1893), the Rumford medal (1926), and the Copley medal (1931).
From 1876 to 1881, Schuster did research on the ohm (a unit of electrical resistance) at Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory. Schuster served as professor of applied mathematics at Owens College from 1881 to 1887 and was Langworthy professor of physics from 1887 to 1907. During this time, he conducted much of his research on the atmosphere and wrote the book An Introduction to the Theory of Optics, published in 1904.
Schuster was knighted in 1920. His health declined in his later years, and he died on Oct. 14, 1934, in Twyford, England.