He was educated at Batley Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he gained First Class Honours in Natural Sciences.

[9] After graduating in 1900, he began researching the emission of electricity from hot bodies at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, and in October 1902 he was made a fellow at Trinity.

Elizabeth Mary Dixon Richardson married the prominent mathematician Oswald Veblen.

Owen Willans Richardson had a son, Harold Owen Richardson, who specialised in Nuclear Physics and was also the chairman of the Physics Department at Bedford College, London University and later on became emeritus professor at London University.

[citation needed] Richardson was elected an International Member of the American Philosophical Society in 1910.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1928, "for his work on the thermionic phenomenon and especially for the discovery of the law named after him".