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.
