Edward Andrade


Edward Neville da Costa Andrade FRS was an English physicist, writer, and poet. He told The Literary Digest his name was pronounced "as written, i.e., like air raid, with and substituted for air." In the scientific world Andrade is best known for work that first determined the wavelength of a type of gamma radiation, proving it was far higher in energies than X-rays known at the time. In popular culture he was best known for his appearances on The Brains Trust.

Life

Edward Neville Andrade was a Sephardi Jew, and was a descendant of Moses da Costa Andrade. da Costa Andrade was his 2nd great grandfather, a feather merchant in London's East End. The surname "Andrade" might nevertheless be of Portuguese origin.
Edward Neville studied for a doctorate at the University of Heidelberg and then had a brief but productive spell of research with Ernest Rutherford at Manchester in 1914. They carried out diffraction experiments to determine the wavelengths of gamma-rays from radium, and were the first to be able to quantitate these, thereby showing that they were shorter than the wavelengths of then-known X-ray radiation that was produced by "Roentgen tubes". He joined the Royal Artillery during the First World War, and then became Professor of Physics at the Ordnance College in Woolwich in 1920.

Career

He was Quain Professor of Physics at University College, London from 1928 to 1950, and then Fullerian Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution for three years, until opposition to his attempts to reform the RI led to a vote of no confidence in him by members of the RI, following which he resigned. In 1943 Andrade was invited to deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures on Vibrations and Waves, then in 1950 he developed the lectures further and presented the series on Waves and Vibrations.
Andrade was also a broadcaster, coming to fame during the War on BBC radio's The Brains Trust.
His papers are held by the University of Leicester