Owen Willans Richardson was born in Dewsbury, Yorkshire, England, in 1879. He was the eldest of three children born to Joshua Henry and Charlotte Maria Willans Richardson. Richardson earned first-class honors in 1900 at Trinity College, Cambridge, in botany, chemistry, and physics, and was awarded his B.A. degree. He then stayed on at Trinity for his graduate studies in chemistry and physics and, in 1902, was appointed a fellow at the college. Two years later he was chosen for a Clerk Maxwell scholarship and was awarded his D.Sc. by University College, London.

Richardson's earliest research dealt with the properties of the electron. As early as 1901 he began the studies for which he was to become most famous, thermionics, a term that Richardson himself coined. The term refers to the emission of electrons from a heated metal. In his first studies, Richardson used platinum metal since it had the highest...