Dempster, Arthur Jeffrey

Arthur Jeffrey Dempster, (born Aug. 14, 1886, Toronto, Ont., Can.—died March 11, 1950, Stuart, Fla., U.S.), American physicist who built the first mass spectrometer, a device used to separate and measure the quantities of different charged particles, such as atomic nuclei or molecular fragments.

Dempster was educated at the University of Toronto (A.B., 1909; M.A., 1910) and then studied in Germany. He went to the United States in 1914 and obtained his doctorate in physics at the University of Chicago in 1916. He built his first mass spectrometer in 1918, and he began teaching at the University of Chicago in 1919. In 1936, with Kenneth T. Bainbridge of the United States and J.H.E. Mattauch of Austria, he developed a double-focusing type of mass spectrograph, a device used to measure the mass of atomic nuclei. Dempster devoted much of his career almost exclusively to a single task—that of using mass spectrometry techniques to discover stable isotopes of the chemical elements and their relative abundances. He discovered more such isotopes than anyone except Francis William Aston, the inventor of the mass spectrograph. Dempster discovered the isotope uranium-235, which is used in atomic bombs.