Henry Brose

Henry Herman Leopold Adolph Brose (15 September 1890 – 24 February 1965) was an Australian physicist. He was the first Australian to be awarded a PhD from the University of Oxford, and translated a number of key physics texts into English. Suspected of sympathy with the Nazi regime, he was interned in Australia from 1940-1943, which ended his academic career. Life Born in Adelaide, he attended Prince Alfred College and graduated from the University of Adelaide in 1910 with a B.Sc. in mathematics. A member of the Adelaide University Athletics Club, Brose was awarded a University Blue for Athletics in 1910. In 1911-12 he taught French at Prince Alfred College, and in 1913 was awarded the Rhodes Scholarship for South Australia. Brose went up to Christ Church, Oxford to study mathematics. While visiting relatives in Hamburg in 1914, he was arrested by the German authorities and interned at Ruhleben, outside Berlin, as a civilian prisoner for the duration of the First World War. During his captivity Brose became interested in the Theory of Relativity and translated some German texts into English. On return to Oxford in 1919, he was awarded simultaneous B.A. and M.A. degrees, following special decrees. In 1925 he completed a PhD there on the motion of electrons in oxygen, under the supervision of John Sealy Edward Townsend. In doing so, he became the first Australian to earn a PhD (there called a D. Phil.) from Oxford. He then went on to hold a number of academic positions including Lecturer in Physics at the University of Sydney and Professor of Physics at the University of Nottingham. From 1922 and 1932 he translated sixteen physics texts from German into English, from such authors as Max Born, Arnold Sommerfeld, Erwin Freundlich, and Max Planck. Brose later went on to work in cancer research, holding positions as a physicist, a pathologist and a biochemist. Brose made an enormous contribution to the scientific world of his time both in Australia and across the world, as indicated by his vast collection of Manuscripts still archived in the University of Adelaide.