Abstract
THE Council of the Physical Society has this year awarded the fifteenth Duddell Medal to Prof. Hans Geiger, of the University of Tubingen. The medal is awarded to "persons who have contributed to the advancement of knowledge by the invention or design of scientific instruments, or by the discovery of materials used in their construction". Geiger's connexion with Great Britain goes back to the days, early in this century, when he went to Manchester to study radioactivity under the direction of Lord Rutherford, and it will also be remembered that one of the early results of this happy partnership was the demonstration of the possibility of detecting a single α-particle by its electrical effect. The method in its original form was somewhat tedious and troublesome, but the invention of the 'point' or Geiger counter made possible much more rapid counting, the counting of β- as well as of α-particles and, in its more recent form, introduced by Geiger himself, even the differentiation of the effects produced by α- and β-particles. These early researches and inventions laid the foundations on which have been built the more modern elaborate and less exacting automatic methods of counting used in this field.
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Prof. Hans Geiger. Nature 141, 929 (1938). https://doi.org/10.1038/141929b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/141929b0