Poignant tribute to the brilliant mind of Henry Moseley

One hundred years ago this month, one of the brightest minds in Oxford had his life cut short at the Battle of Gallipoli.

He was 27 years-old. Had he lived, physicist Henry “Harry” Moseley would most likely have been awarded a Nobel Prize the following year.

The life and untimely demise of this brilliant young man, just one of so many to have their promising careers snubbed out by the Great War, is the subject of the latest exhibition at Oxford’s Museum of the History of Science.

Dear Harry… Henry Moseley: A Scientist Lost to War is a human story – one of a son, scientist and soldier. It is fascinating, no matter how much you know of physics or chemistry, and also deeply moving.

“It’s a new departure for us,” says director Silke Ackermann. “Most exhibitions in science museums have very little human content – you’re faced with lots of objects. But there’s a person behind this one. Not just a scientist but a son and soldier too.

“We’ve taken great care to talk about him as a son. We include Harry’s correspondence – entries from his mother’s diary, for example – and we have worked closely with Turkish colleagues as well as Trinity College, Oxford where he studied, and other partners to mark Moseley’s great contribution to science.

“We reveal the impact of his death on the international scientific community and its relationship with government and the armed forces.”

In the short time between his graduation in 1910 and the onset of the First World War, Moseley had already shown himself to be an exceptionally promising scientist. His work on the X-ray spectra of the elements provided a new foundation for the Periodic Table and contributed to the development of the nuclear model of the atom.

Born in Dorset in 1887, he grew up in Oxford, went to school at Summer Fields in Summertown, and aged 13 won a scholarship to Eton College where he won prizes in classics, chemistry and physics. He also took up rowing.

“We know a lot about Harry,” Dr Ackermann said. “For instance, he was very naughty! He shared a passion for collecting birds’ eggs with his sister Marjery. He didn’t get a first at Oxford and so thought himself a failure. He was born into a very distinguished scientific family.”

After completing his degree at Oxford (specialising in physics at Trinity) he went to work for the “father of nuclear physics” Ernest Rutherford. The significance of Harry’s research at Manchester was quickly recognised, and by 1914 – just 40 months into his research career – he was applying for professorships in physics.

The war intervened. In Australia at a conference when war was declared, he hurried home to sign up as a Royal Engineer. So keen was he, he practised semaphore and Morse code on the boat home, writing to his mother: “I have been reading up a smattering from War Office manuals... practising flag wagging while crossing the Pacific.” Exactly a century on, the Dear Harry… exhibition is timed to coincide with some of the key dates in Moseley’s preparations for Gallipoli, as well as his death on August 10, 1915.

A photograph c.1914 shows Harry in his Royal Engineers officer’s uniform complete with signaller’s armbands. Equipment loaned from the Royal Signals Museum in Dorset gives a feel for his military training and the Gallipoli campaign.

In June 1915, his division having arrived in Alexandria, he wrote his will. Even then, Dr Ackermann said, Harry had the presence of mind to consider what would happen to his scientific legacy (interesting to read, this is quoted on the wall).

• Dr Elizabeth Bruton and Dr Stephen Johnston

The Allies landed in Suvla Bay on August 6, 1915 to launch an attack against the Turkish and German forces on the Gallipoli Peninsula. It was hand-to-hand combat. Harry was killed in action and, like that of so many others, his body was never found.

His mother recorded in her diary the moment the War Office telegram arrived: “My Harry was killed in the Dardanelles” – its brevity concealing yet conveying the agony of waiting.

Harry Moseley’s death caused a massive outcry in 1915 – in Germany too, even though, by then, he was formally an enemy. One British newspaper reported on the “Sacrifice of a Genius”. The colossal impact of his death ultimately led to rethinking of how to use such outstanding scientists in the war effort.

The museum is showing Dear Harry… in a refurbished special exhibitions space, and additionally will permanently display some objects after the exhibition closes.

The exhibition features Moseley’s original scientific apparatus, battlefield footage and rare artefacts from the Royal Engineers Museum, Library and Archive, the Royal Signals Museum, the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford, and Trinity College.

Poignant from beginning to end, the exhibition concludes with the famous quote from Ataturk (the Turkish nationalist leader and first president of the Turkish republic) written in 1934 in tribute to the Anzacs who died at Gallipoli, which contains the lines: “There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours ... You, the mothers who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace”.

Where&When
‘Dear Harry… Henry Moseley: A Scientist Lost to War’ is at the Museum of the History of Science, Broad Street, Oxford, until October 18 mhs.ox.ac.uk/moseley