81 Facts About Mark Oliphant

Mark Oliphant was awarded an 1851 Exhibition Scholarship in 1927 on the strength of the research he had done on mercury, and went to England, where he studied under Sir Ernest Rutherford at the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory.

Mark Oliphant discovered the respective nuclei of helium-3 and of tritium.

Mark Oliphant discovered that when they reacted with each other, the particles that were released had far more energy than they started with.

Mark Oliphant left the Cavendish Laboratory in 1937 to become the Poynting Professor of Physics at the University of Birmingham.

Mark Oliphant attempted to build a 60-inch cyclotron at the university, but its completion was postponed by the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe in 1939.

Mark Oliphant became involved with the development of radar, heading a group at the University of Birmingham that included John Randall and Harry Boot.

Mark Oliphant formed part of the MAUD Committee, which reported in July 1941, that an atomic bomb was not only feasible, but might be produced as early as 1943.

Mark Oliphant was instrumental in spreading the word of this finding in the United States, thereby starting what became the Manhattan Project.

Mark Oliphant retired in 1967, but was appointed Governor of South Australia on the advice of Premier Don Dunstan.

Mark Oliphant became the first South Australian-born governor of South Australia.

Mark Oliphant assisted in the founding of the Australian Democrats political party, and he was the chairman of the meeting in Melbourne in 1977, at which the party was launched.

Marcus "Mark" Laurence Elwin Oliphant was born on 8 October 1901 in Kent Town, a suburb of Adelaide.

Mark Oliphant's father was Harold George "Baron" Olifent, a civil servant with the South Australian Engineering and Water Supply Department and part-time lecturer in economics with the Workers' Educational Association.

Mark Oliphant's mother was Beatrice Edith Fanny Oliphant, nee Tucker, an artist.

Mark Oliphant was named after Marcus Clarke, the Australian author, and Laurence Oliphant, the British traveller and mystic.

Mark Oliphant had four younger brothers: Roland, Keith, Nigel and Donald; all were registered at birth with the surname Olifent.

Mark Oliphant was found to be completely deaf in one ear and he needed glasses for severe astigmatism and short-sightedness.

Mark Oliphant was first educated at primary schools in Goodwood and Mylor, after the family moved there in 1910.

Mark Oliphant attended Unley High School in Adelaide, and, for his final year in 1918, Adelaide High School.

Mark Oliphant then secured a cadetship with the State Library of South Australia, which allowed him to take courses at the University of Adelaide at night.

In 1919, Mark Oliphant began studying at the University of Adelaide.

Mark Oliphant received his Bachelor of Science degree in 1921 and then did honours in 1922, supervised by Grant.

Roy Burdon, who acted as head of the department when Grant went on sabbatical in 1925, worked with Mark Oliphant to produce two papers in 1927 on the properties of mercury, "The Problem of the Surface Tension of Mercury and the Action of Aqueous Solutions on a Mercury Surface" and "Adsorption of Gases on the Surface of Mercury".

Mark Oliphant later recalled that Burdon taught him "the extraordinary exhilaration there was in even minor discoveries in the field of physics".

Mark Oliphant married Rosa Louise Wilbraham, who was from Adelaide, on 23 May 1925.

Mark Oliphant made Rosa's wedding ring in the laboratory from a gold nugget from the Coolgardie Goldfields that his father had given him.

Mark Oliphant applied for an 1851 Exhibition Scholarship on the strength of the research he had done on mercury with Burdon.

Mark Oliphant was invited to afternoon tea by Rutherford and Lady Rutherford.

Mark Oliphant soon met other researchers at the Cavendish Laboratory, including Patrick Blackett, Edward Bullard, James Chadwick, John Cockcroft, Charles Ellis, Peter Kapitza, Egon Bretscher, Philip Moon and Ernest Walton.

Mark Oliphant submitted his PhD thesis on The Neutralization of Positive Ions at Metal Surfaces, and the Emission of Secondary Electrons in December 1929.

Mark Oliphant secured an 1851 Senior Studentship, of which there were five awarded each year.

Mark Oliphant was interred in an unmarked grave in the Ascension Parish Burial Ground in Cambridge, alongside Timothy Cockcroft, the infant son of Sir John and Lady Elizabeth Cockcroft, who had died the year before.

Mark Oliphant followed up the work by constructing a particle accelerator that could fire protons with up to 600,000 electronvolts of energy.

Mark Oliphant soon confirmed the results of Cockcroft and Walton on the artificial disintegration of the nucleus and positive ions.

Mark Oliphant produced a series of six papers over the following two years.

Mark Oliphant used electromagnetic separation to separate the isotopes of lithium.

Mark Oliphant was the first to experimentally demonstrate nuclear fusion.

Mark Oliphant found that when deuterons reacted with nuclei of helium-3, tritium or with other deuterons, the particles that were released had far more energy than they started with.

Mark Oliphant was the first to conceive of the proton synchrotron, a new type of cyclic particle accelerator.

Neville Moss, its Professor of Mining Engineering and the Dean of its Faculty of Science approached Mark Oliphant, who presented his terms.

Mark Oliphant sailed for New York on 10 December 1938, and met Lawrence in Berkeley.

Mark Oliphant was aware of the problems in building cyclotrons encountered by Chadwick at the University of Liverpool and Cockcroft at the Cavendish Laboratory, and intended to avoid these and get his cyclotron built on time and on budget by following Lawrence's specifications as closely as possible.

Mark Oliphant hoped that it would be running by Christmas 1939, but the outbreak of the Second World War quashed his hopes.

In 1938, Mark Oliphant became involved with the development of radar, then still a secret.

Mark Oliphant obtained a grant from the Admiralty to develop radar systems with wavelengths less than 10 centimetres ; the best available at the time was 150 centimetres.

In 1940, the Fall of France, and the possibility that Britain might be invaded, prompted Mark Oliphant to send his wife and children to Australia.

Mark Oliphant persuaded Professor Thomas Laby to release Eric Burhop and Leslie Martin from their work on optical munitions to work on radar, and they succeeded in building a cavity magnetron in their laboratory at the University of Melbourne in May 1942.

Mark Oliphant worked with Martin on the process of moving the magnetrons for the laboratory to the production line.

Mark Oliphant was one of the people who pushed the American program into motion.

On 5 August 1941, Mark Oliphant flew to the United States in a B-24 Liberator bomber, ostensibly to discuss the radar-development program, but was assigned to find out why the United States was ignoring the findings of the MAUD Committee.

Mark Oliphant then met with the Uranium Committee at its meeting in New York on 26 August 1941.

Mark Oliphant told us we must concentrate every effort on the bomb, and said we had no right to work on power plants or anything but the bomb.

Mark Oliphant found another ally in Oppenheimer, and he not only managed to convince Lawrence and Oppenheimer that an atomic bomb was feasible, but inspired Lawrence to convert his 37-inch cyclotron into a giant mass spectrometer for electromagnetic isotope separation, a technique Mark Oliphant had pioneered in 1934.

On 26 October 1942, Mark Oliphant embarked from Melbourne, taking Rosa and the children back with him.

Mark Oliphant had to leave them behind once more in November 1943 after the British Tube Alloys effort was merged with the American Manhattan Project by the Quebec Agreement, and he left for the United States as part of the British Mission.

Mark Oliphant was one of the scientists whose services the Americans were most eager to secure.

Mark Oliphant secured the services of fellow Australian physicist Harrie Massey, who had been working for the Admiralty on magnetic mines, along with James Stayers and Stanley Duke, who had worked with him on the cavity magnetron.

Mark Oliphant became Lawrence's de facto deputy, and was in charge of the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory when Lawrence was absent.

Mark Oliphant made efforts to involve Australian scientists in the project, and had Sir David Rivett, the head of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, release Eric Burhop to work on the Manhattan Project.

Mark Oliphant briefed Stanley Bruce, the Australian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, on the project, and urged the Australian government to secure Australian uranium deposits.

Characteristically, Mark Oliphant bypassed Chadwick, the head of the British Mission, and sent a report direct to Wallace Akers, the head of the Tube Alloys Directorate in London.

En route, Mark Oliphant met with Chadwick and other members of the British Mission in Washington, where the prospect of resuming an independent British project was discussed.

Mark Oliphant returned to England in March 1945, and resumed his post as a professor of physics at the University of Birmingham.

Mark Oliphant was on holiday in Wales with his family when he first heard of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Mark Oliphant was later to remark that he felt "sort of proud that the bomb had worked, and absolutely appalled at what it had done to human beings".

Mark Oliphant served on the post-war Technical Committee that advised the British government on nuclear weapons, and publicly declared that Britain needed to develop its own nuclear weapons independent of the United States to "avoid the danger of becoming a lesser power".

Mark Oliphant hoped that Britain would assist with the Australian program, and the British were interested in cooperation because Australia had uranium ore and weapons testing sites, and there were concerns that Australia was becoming too closely aligned with the United States.

Mark Oliphant envisaged Canberra one day becoming a university town like Oxford or Cambridge.

In September 1951, Mark Oliphant applied for a visa to travel to the United States for a nuclear physics conference in Chicago.

The visa was not refused, nor was Mark Oliphant accused of subversive activities, but neither was it issued.

In 1955, Mark Oliphant initiated the design and construction of a 500 megajoule homopolar generator, the world's largest.

Mark Oliphant founded the Australian Academy of Science in 1954, teaming up with David Martyn to overcome the obstacles that had frustrated previous attempts.

Mark Oliphant delivered the Academy of Science's 1961 Matthew Flinders Lecture, on the subject of "Faraday in his time and today".

Mark Oliphant retired as Professor of Particle Physics in 1964, and was appointed Professor of Ionised Gases.

Mark Oliphant was invited by the premier, Don Dunstan, to become the Governor of South Australia, a position he held from 1971 to 1976.

Mark Oliphant assisted in the founding of the Australian Democrats political party, and he was the chairman of the meeting in Melbourne in 1977 at which the party was launched.

The Age reported in 1981 that "Sir Mark Oliphant warned the Dunstan Government of the 'grave dangers' of appointing an Australian Aborigine, Sir Douglas Nicholls, to succeed him as South Australia's Governor".

Mark Oliphant was created a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1959, and was made a Companion of the Order of Australia in 1977 "for eminent achievement and merit of the highest degree in the field of public service and in service to the crown".

Late in life, Mark Oliphant watched his wife, Rosa, suffer before her death in 1987, and he became an advocate for voluntary euthanasia.

Mark Oliphant's papers are in the Adolph Basser Library at the Australian Academy of Science, and the Barr Smith Library at the University of Adelaide.

Mark Oliphant's daughter-in-law, Monica Oliphant, is a distinguished Australian physicist specialising in the field of renewable energy, for which she was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2015.