ABSTRACT
John Sealy Edward Townsend was born on 7 June 1868 in Galway, the second son of Edward Townsend, Professor of Civil Engineering at Queen’s College Galway (now the National University of Ireland, Galway). He pursued his studies at Trinity College Dublin and then at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, before being elected to the Wykeham Chair of Experimental Physics at Oxford in 1900. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1903, and knighted in 1941, the same year as his retirement from the Wykeham Chair.
