In awarding the 1990 Nobel Prize in physics to Henry W. Kendall, Richard Taylor , and Jerome Friedman , the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences recognized the importance of the discovery of quarks. Building upon Nobel laureate Ernest Rutherford's research into the structure of the atom, Kendall and his colleagues utilized the newly invented particle accelerator to explore the interior of protons and neutrons. Their results proposed that these components of atoms are composed of even smaller particles called quarks and that quarks are bound together by massless particles known as gluons.

Henry Way Kendall was born on December 9, 1926, in Boston, Massachusetts, the oldest of three children. His parents were Henry P. Kendall, a businessman, and Evelyn Way Kendall. Kendall completed his secondary education at the Deerfield Academy in western Massachusetts in 1945 and immediately entered the U. S. Merchant Marine Academy. He stayed at the academy one year before resigning...