FRANCIS WILLIAM ASTON
    Francis William Aston lived in the years 1877-1945. He studied at Cambridge and was a Rutherford's student. After studies he became Thomson's assistant. They researched together the canal rays - they discovered that neon is a mixture of two components of a different mass - isotopes.
    He was intrigued by isotopes and driven by the desire to isolate them. To that aim he constructed a special device - a mass spectrograph. Aston researched 213 out of the total of 276 isotopes. He became a Cambridge University professor and a Royal Society member. In 1922 he was awarded the Nobel prize.
    In subsequent years the scientist constructed new models of the mass spectrograph and researched isotopes in more detail.

ASTON'S EXPERIMENT - the mass spectrograph