Richardson, Sir Owen Willans, 1879–1959, British physicist, Ph.D. University College, London, 1904. He was a professor at Princeton from 1906 to 1913 and at King's College London from 1914 until his retirement in 1944. He received the 1928 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on thermionic emission. In 1901 he noted that the rate of electron emission increases rapidly with an increase in surface temperature, an effect now known Richardson's law. The law led to innovations in telecommunications, in particular in the development of radio and television tubes. Richardson was knighted in 1939.
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