Victor Franz Hess

Victor Franz Hess was an Austrian-American experimental physicist. He discovered cosmic radiation through a series of high-altitude balloon flights in 1911 and 1912, showing that ionizing radiation increased with altitude rather than decreasing as expected, revealing that some of it arrives from beyond Earth's atmosphere. He shared the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics with Carl David Anderson for this discovery. Hess later emigrated to the United States and became a naturalized citizen in 1944.