Charles Drummond Ellis

Sir Charles Drummond Ellis FRS[1] (b. Hampstead, 11 August 1895; died Cookham 10 January 1980) was an English physicist and scientific administrator.

Another detainee in the camp was James Chadwick who was later to receive the Nobel Prize for his work on the discovery of the neutron.

Chadwick inspired Ellis and together they erected a laboratory in one of the horse stables where they undertook scientific experiments on the photochemical process.

[citation needed] After World War II Ellis held several posts which were not related to nuclear weapons.

He was director of the Finance Corporation for Industry, in charge of research and development for the National Coal Board.

He was president of the British Coal Utilization Research Association from 1946 to 1955 and a member of the advisory council to the minister of fuel and power from 1947 to 1955.

He became scientific adviser to the British American Tobacco Company (BAT) at a time when the association between smoking and various diseases was just starting to be suspected.

This phenomenon had been known since 1914, but it was not until 1927 that Charles Drummond Ellis, a British experimental physicist, and his colleague William Alfred Wooster were able to establish conclusively that the energies were distributed continuously at the electrons' emission from the nucleus.

Before this result, Ellis had engaged in a long dispute with Lise Meitner in Germany, who held that that the electrons were slowed down unevenly only after being emitted.