Patrick Blackett was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and a highly influential military advisor during the Second World War. He lived at 48 Paultons Square in Chelsea between 1953 and1969 and while there made a discovery that contributed to the general acceptance of continental drift theory.

COSMIC RAYS

In 1921 Blackett undertook ground-breaking sub-atomic research into cosmic rays at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. He resumed the work in 1933, this time heading up his own laboratory at Birkbeck College, London. To detect the rays, he set up giant electromagnetic equipment in a ‘magnet hut’ and on an unused platform in Holborn Underground station. The latter magnet, which survived until the 1970s, was christened ‘Josephine’.

For this work Blackett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1948.
 

SECOND WORLD WAR

Blackett joined the RAF’s Coastal Command in March 1941 and led a team that used mathematics to solve problems – recalculating, for instance, the depth settings for anti-submarine explosives. But it was at the Admiralty where he proved to be invaluable to the war effort.

From January 1942 until the end of the war he advised the government on how to apply scientific research to win the war in the Atlantic. In proving that larger naval convoys incurred fewer losses, he was pivotal to the anti U-boat campaign that was so vital in winning the war.

DISSENTING VOICE

Blackett opposed the saturation bombing of German cities, viewing the policy as both inhumane and ineffective. His was also the sole dissenting voice from the MAUD committee’s 1941 finding that Britain should produce its own atomic bomb. After the war, more controversially, he advocated wider international co-operation on atomic science, to include the USSR, and a neutralist British foreign policy.

Having formed strong socialist political views at Cambridge University, Blackett was sometimes perceived as pro-Soviet, with George Orwell even labelling him a ‘fellow traveller’ in 1949. Nonetheless he commanded the respect of many who disagreed with his ideology. The physiologist AV Hill, for example, thought him a valuable member of the Royal Society council despite his ‘queer political notions’.
 

PAULTONS SQUARE YEARS

After a spell in Manchester after the war, Blackett returned to London in 1953 and lived at 48 Paultons Square until 1969. When he accepted a life peerage that year, he took the title of Baron Blackett of Chelsea. While living here, he published a paper on the link between magnetism in rocks and plate tectonics, which proved to be an important step towards the public triumph of continental drift theory in 1964. He also advised the government on scientific policy and took a leading role in setting up the Ministry of Technology. From 1965 until 1970 he served as President of the Royal Society – perhaps the appointment that he valued most of all.