Ernest Gordon Cox
English crystallographer and public servant (1906-1996)
Sir (Ernest) Gordon Cox TD KBE FRS (24 April 1906 – 23 June 1996) was a British crystallographer and structural chemist. He was the father of the British geologist Keith Gordon Cox.
Early life and education
Cox was born in Twerton, Somerset on 24 April 1906. He was the son of Ernest Henry Cox (1884–1987), a market gardener, and his wife Rosina Ring. He was educated at the City of Bath Boys' School and then read physics at the University of Bristol, graduating in 1927. He was awarded the degree of DSc by Bristol in 1936.
Early academic career
In 1927 Cox joined the team led by Professor Sir William Bragg FRS in the Davy-Faraday Laboratory at the Royal Institution in London where he worked on x-ray measurements of crystalline structures. In 1929 he moved to the Department of Chemistry at the University of Birmingham, eventually being promoted to Reader in Chemical Crystallography in 1941.
War years
Cox joined the Territorial Army in 1936, but for the early war years remained at Birmingham to work on explosives. In 1942 he became Senior Officer in charge of the laboratories of the Inter-Services Research Bureau (ISRB), which was a cover name for the Special Operations Executive (SOE).
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This entry incorporates text from “Ernest Gordon Cox” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.