His father, Franz London, was professor of mathematics at the University of Bonn and his mother, Luise Burger, was the daughter of a prosperous textile manufacturer.
Frederick Lindemann invited Francis Simon to join the Clarendon Laboratory at the University of Oxford in 1933 supported by money obtained from chemical company ICI.
Fritz held out for a position at Oxford which never came and later accepted an offer by the Henri Poincaré Institute in Paris.
In 1940 Heinz was declared a civilian enemy alien and interned on the Isle of Man, but was then released to co-operate with the British nuclear program.
In late 1933, he obtained his PhD under the low temperature physicist Franz Simon at the University of Breslau, with a thesis "on the possibility of the occurrence of high frequency residual resistance in superconductors".
London was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1961,[1] and his nomination readPopulated the finite depth to which a magnetic field penetrates into a superconductor.
Postulated the increase of the critical field with decreasing size on a thermodynamical basis and demonstrated the existence of a striking effect of this kind by direct experiment (with Appleyard and others).