Basil Ferdinand Jamieson Schonland

Sir Basil Ferdinand Jamieson Schonland was a South African physicist, born in Grahamstown, Cape Colony, on 2 February 1896, the son of the botanist Selmar Schonland, a founder of Rhodes University. He was noted for his research on lightning, his involvement in the development of radar during World War II and for being the first president of the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. He studied at Rhodes University and at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, served with the Royal Engineers in France in the First World War, and after the war became a research student at the Cavendish Laboratory, where he studied the scattering of beta particles. In 1922 he returned to the University of Cape Town as a lecturer and later professor of physics. In 1937 he became the founding director of the Bernard Price Institute of Geophysics at Witwatersrand University, where he made significant contributions to the study of atmospheric electricity, photographing lightning and investigating the electric fields generated by thunderclouds. He died on 24 November 1972.