Alfred Fowler

Alfred Fowler was an English astronomer and spectroscopist, born in Wilsden on the outskirts of Bradford, Yorkshire, on 22 March 1868. He was educated at the Normal School of Science in London, later absorbed into Imperial College, and he was appointed Instructor and later Assistant Professor of Astrophysics there, working at Imperial College until his death. He was an expert in spectroscopy and was one of the first to determine that sunspots are cooler than the regions around them. In 1912 he reproduced in the laboratory, from a hydrogen and helium mixture, the lines that became known as the Pickering and Fowler series, which proved significant for understanding the atom and which Niels Bohr correctly attributed to ionised helium. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1910, awarded its Royal Medal in 1918, and was president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1919 to 1921. He died in Ealing, London, on 24 June 1940.