Charles Glover Barkla (7 June 1877 – 23 October 1944) was an English physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1917 for his discovery of characteristic X-rays.

[3] In 1899 Barkla was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, with an 1851 Research Fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851,[4] to work in the Cavendish Laboratory under the physicist J. J. Thomson (discoverer of the electron).

During his first two years at Cambridge, under the directions of Thomson, Barkla studied the velocity of electromagnetic waves along wires of different widths and materials.

[8] This topic was relevant to the question of whether X-rays were indeed a type of electromagnetic radiation as many physicists suspected, because Lionel Wilberforce proposed to use these secondary rays to generate tertiary ones and prove the existence of polarization by rotating the detecting part of his experimental apparatus.

[9] He published a brief summary of his findings in Nature in March 1904[10] and a more detailed account in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1905.

In 2012 a gritter in Barkla's home town of Widnes was named in his honour, following a competition run by the local newspaper.