Britain
Henry Moseley
1887–1915 Royal Engineers officer, Gallipoli, 1915
Born in Weymouth, the son of an Oxford professor of anatomy, Henry Moseley studied at Eton and Trinity College, Oxford, and in 1910 joined Ernest Rutherford's laboratory at the University of Manchester. In 1913 he measured the X-ray spectra of the elements and found that X-ray wavelength varies systematically with atomic number, a relationship now called Moseley's law that gave atomic numbers a physical basis. He also showed that only a few elements remained undiscovered between aluminum and gold. In 1914 he returned from a scientific meeting in Australia to obtain a commission in the Royal Engineers. He served at Gallipoli as a communications officer and was killed by a Turkish bullet on 10 August 1915, aged 27. Many, Rutherford among them, believed a Nobel Prize would have followed.