Ronald Norrish: The Chemist Who Captured Ultrafast Reactions

On November ninth, eighteen ninety-seven, Ronald George Wreyford Norrish was born in Cambridge, England. He was a chemist, and his academic field was physical chemistry and reaction kinetics, with a specialization in photochemistry.

Norrish is best known for his pioneering work in studying extremely fast chemical reactions. Together with his student George Porter, he developed a revolutionary technique called flash photolysis in the nineteen-forties and fifties. This method involved triggering a chemical reaction with an intense, short-lived flash of light, and then using a second flash of light to measure the concentration of the temporary, unstable intermediates – the reactive molecules that form and disappear in microseconds or even shorter times. This was the first time anyone managed to observe and quantify these short-lived intermediate steps in chemical reactions directly. The method opened up an entirely new scientific field for the study of reaction mechanisms. For this groundbreaking development, which provided insight into the fundamental steps of chemical processes, Norrish and Porter were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in nineteen sixty-seven, jointly with Manfred Eigen.