Francis William Aston FRS[2] (1 September 1877 – 20 November 1945) was a British chemist and physicist who won the 1922 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery, by means of his mass spectrograph, of isotopes in many non-radioactive elements and for his enunciation of the whole number rule.

In 1898 he started as a student of Frankland financed by a Forster Scholarship; his work concerned optical properties of tartaric acid compounds.

[8][9][10] After the death of his father, and a trip around the world in 1908, he was appointed lecturer at the University of Birmingham in 1909 but moved to the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge on the invitation of J. J. Thomson in 1910.

Ions of a particular charge/mass ratio would leave a characteristic parabolic trace on a photographic plate, demonstrating for the first time that atoms of a single element could have different masses.

[12] It was speculations about isotopy that directly gave rise to the building of a mass spectrometer capable of separating the isotopes of the chemical elements.

[citation needed] After the war, he returned to research at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge and completed building his first mass spectrograph that he reported on in 1919.

In 1921, Aston became a member of the International Committee on Atomic Weights[15] and a fellow of the Royal Society[2] and received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry the following year.

Not content with these sports he also engaged in swimming, golf, especially with Rutherford and other colleagues in Cambridge,[19] tennis, winning some prizes at open tournaments in England Wales and Ireland and learning surfing in Honolulu in 1909.

He joined several expeditions to study solar eclipses in Benkoeben in 1925, Sumatra in 1932, Magog in Canada on 31 August 1932 and Kamishari Hokkaido, Japan on June19th 1936.