Things to Do in Cambridge: The Old Cavendish Lab with Town & Gown Tours
Situated down the quaint Free School Lane, the Old Cavendish Lab site is a short walk from the Corpus Clock and Eagle Pub. It is an unmissable site and is featured in all our tours.
Founded in 1874 by the Duke of Devonshire William Cavendish and named after the great physicist and chemist Henry Cavendish, the Cavendish Laboratory has been the site of a number of the greatest scientific discoveries and home to a number of the greatest scientists of the past 150 years.
The first director of the Cavendish Lab was the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who is often regarded as the ‘father of modern physics’. Subsequent directors of the Cavendish Lab include J. J. Thomson, who discovered the electron here in 1897, and the nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford. It was under Rutherford’s leadership that James Chadwick discovered the neutron in 1932 and John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton split the atom for the very first time.
After Rutherford Lawrence Bragg, the youngest ever Noble laureate at the age of 25, took over. Lawrence Bragg, along with his father, discovery that X-rays could be used to determine the positions of atoms within a crystal. Bragg’s appointment as the Cavendish Lab’s director, shifted the lab’s focus away from nuclear physics and towards biological substances. The crystallographic work of Rosalind Franklin was fundamental in the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 by Francis Crick and James Watson. Both our Women of Cambridge tour and Cambridge Science Tour discuss in length the story and controversy behind the discovery of the structure of DNA.
In total 30 members of the Cavendish Lab have received a Nobel Prize for their contribution to the scientific world. This includes Dorothy Hodgkin, the first and only British women to win and Noble Prize in science, and Cambridge University’s most recent noble laureate Didier Queloz, who was awarded the Noble Prize in Physics in 2019.
In 1974, a century after it was founded, the Cavendish Lab relocated to the west campus site, where it continues to be a world-renowned and pioneering research group.
To found out more about scientists of Cambridge and the Cavendish Lab book a spot on our Cambridge Science Tour.
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