Edmund John Bowen

Edmund John Bowen, known as Ted Bowen, was a British physical chemist, born in Worcester on 29 April 1898, the eldest of four children of Edmund Riley Bowen and Lilias Bowen. He attended the Royal Grammar School Worcester and won the Brackenbury Scholarship in 1915 to the University of Oxford, where he studied chemistry. He volunteered for training as a gunner officer in 1916 and served as a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery in the First World War before returning to Balliol College in 1919. In 1922 he became a Fellow in Chemistry of University College, Oxford, and later served as its Domestic Bursar and as Junior Proctor of the university in 1936. He was created a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1935 for his research into fluorescence, was awarded the Davy Medal in 1963, and wrote the seminal book The Chemical Aspects of Light. Much of his research was carried out at the Balliol-Trinity Laboratories in Oxford. He died on 19 November 1980.