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JOHN FRANK ALLEN

6 May 1908—22 April 2001

Biogr. Mems Fell. R. Soc. 75, 7–27 (2023)

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 JOHN FRANK ALLEN
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6 May 1908—22 April 2001

Elected FRS 1949

By Jonathan G. M. Armitage1, * and

Malcolm S. Longair CBE FRS FRSE2
1
Ravenscraig, Roome Bay Avenue, Crail KY10 3TR, UK
2
Cavendish Laboratory, J. J. Thomson Avenue, Cambridge CB3 0HE, UK
John Frank (Jack) Allen was a Canadian-born pioneer of low temperature physics. With
his graduate student, Don Misener, he discovered the phenomenon of superfluidity on
passing HeII through very narrow glass capillaries. Simultaneously, and independently, the
phenomenon was discovered by Piotr Kapitza FRS in the Soviet Union. Jack’s most famous
discovery in 1938 was the fountain effect in liquid HeII, a further manifestation of the role of
superfluidity at very low temperatures. The Nobel Prize for the discovery of superfluidity was
awarded to Kapitza in 1978. Jack invented the O-ring as a reliable vacuum seal and, in 1947,
followed this by the indium-ring cryogenic seal. In 1958, with John Bardeen (ForMemRS
1973) and Jan de Boer, he initiated a project that saved three million cubic feet of helium
gas from being lost to the world. After running the Mond Laboratory in the Cavendish
Laboratory from the late 1930s, in 1947 he was appointed professor of natural philosophy
at St Andrews University, where he led the construction of a new physics building and built
up an internationally respected department. He campaigned for student representation, and
was well known for his physics demonstrations. In later life, he carried out a programme to
erect plaques to Nevil Maskelyne FRS, who measured the gravitational constant G, and to
celebrate the achievements of St Andrews luminaries.

Family background and early life

John Frank Allen, always known as Jack, was born on 6 May 1908 in Winnipeg, Manitoba,
Canada. He was the second of three children of Frank and Sarah Estelle (née Harper)

* Email: Armitage@talk21.com

2023 The Author(s)

https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbm.2023.0021 9 Published by the Royal Society
 10 Biographical Memoirs

Allen, both born in New Brunswick. The family was descended from Yorkshire dissidents
who emigrated to Boston and Philadelphia. They became successful professionals, but were
opposed to the 1776 American separatists and were transported to New Brunswick. The family
again became professionals as teachers, doctors and ministers of religion, mostly Methodists.
Jack’s father was a physicist with a PhD from Cornell University. As professor of physics
and mineralogy, he was one of the first six professors in the newly created University of
Manitoba in 1904. He spent the rest of his academic career studying physiological physics.
Tragically, Jack’s mother died when he was aged seven. His father became progressively
withdrawn from his children and very strict and religious—he became a Methodist lay
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preacher. The children of parents of other denominations were not welcome in the house—
Jack became a lonely child with no close friends.
Jack attended various local schools; the final two years of his secondary education was
spent at the Kelvin Technical High School. There he studied not only English, French, Latin,
mathematics, physics and chemistry, but also drawing, painting, art appreciation, mechanical
drawing, workshop practice and mechanical, wood and metal working, the latter including
forging. This education stood him in good stead in designing the apparatus he would need in
his future research.
In 1924 Jack entered the University of Manitoba aged 16. He studied for a BA degree
rather than a BSc since the former course enabled him to take a four-year course in physics,
chemistry, geology and mathematics as well as history, English and French. He never regretted
taking this broader course. He graduated with honours in 1928.
There were no jobs available locally, but his father found a few hundred dollars from a
research fund to carry out studies in his father’s field of the physiological sensory reflex and
the response to stimulus and fatigue in vision and hearing. His first project was to test the
Weber–Fechner law for vision and hearing, that the least perceptible increment in the intensity
of stimulus is proportional to the existing steady intensity, a logarithmic relation, the constant
of proportionality taking different values in different intensity ranges (2)*. Already having a
good meter for light intensity, he devised and built one for sound, his first instrumental project.
It consisted of a Rayleigh-disc suspended at the mouth of a quarter wavelength organ-pipe of
variable length. With this he studied the variations of enhancement and depression of auditory
sensitivity as a function of the intensity of the stimulus (3, 4). He was also the sole author
of the paper ‘The binocular oscillation and fusion of colors’, which almost turned him into a
biophysicist (8).

University of Toronto
In autumn 1929, Jack was awarded a three-year sequential Canadian National Research
Council scholarship/studentship/fellowship, which he held in the physics department of the
University of Toronto. John McLennan FRS, professor of physics and head of department,
was Canada’s most distinguished physicist, who in 1898–1899 had studied with J. J. Thomson
FRS in the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge (Eve 1935). When McLennan was appointed
assistant professor in Toronto in 1903, the physics department was at a low ebb. Over the next

* Numbers in this form refer to the bibliography at the end of the text.
 John Frank Allen 11

30 years, he transformed the department, building new premises for physics and carrying out
cutting-edge research in the areas of radioactivity, spectroscopy and low temperature physics.
In 1908, Kamerlingh Onnes (ForMemRS 1916) and his group in Leiden succeeded in
liquefying helium. They soon discovered that the electrical resistance of mercury, instead
of falling steadily on cooling, vanished abruptly at what became known as the critical
temperature T c at 4.15 K, the discovery of the phenomenon of superconductivity. By 1928
they established that liquid helium undergoes a higher-order phase transition at 2.17 K, at
which its specific heat capacity diverges and its density shows an anomaly. Helium I (HeI) is
the higher-temperature phase and helium II (HeII) the lower-temperature phase. Because of
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the shape of the relation between specific heat capacity and temperature at 2.17 K, it was called
the λ-point. With his graduate student, Gordon Shrum, McLennan built a helium liquefier of
the same design as that of the Leiden group in 1923, the second group to successfully produce
liquid helium. By 1929, the Toronto physics department was the best physics research school
in Canada.
When Jack arrived in Toronto to carry out his PhD programme, he chose low temperature
physics, about which he knew nothing at the time. He soon became the most frequent user of
liquid helium. Although McLennan was nominally his supervisor, Jack largely worked on his
own. Nonetheless, McLennan put his name as first author on all Toronto papers.
Jack’s first experiment, suggested by McLennan, was to test ruthenium for
superconductivity, with a positive result (1). Not long after, however, Meissner & Vogt (1930)
repeated the experiment and found no superconductivity. It took Jack a year to find some fresh
ruthenium beads, with which he made two new specimens, the second by heating a graphite
tube containing tungsten powder. It turned out that tungsten carbide is a superconductor (6),
although neither tungsten nor carbon themselves are. Jack’s first ruthenium specimen had been
heavily contaminated with both tungsten and carbon.
Jack continued to test other metallic compounds and alloys for superconductivity, including
various mixtures of lead (Pb) with bismuth (Bi), antimony (Sb) and arsenic (As). The Toronto
liquefier was used as a gas cryostat and he found that Pb-Bi-Sb had T c = 9.0 K, the highest
known T c at that time.
He next studied thermal expansion above and below T c . Initially, he could only reach
4.2 K, but ultimately achieved lower temperatures with a capacitance bridge (5). Using pure
Pb and Pb-Bi-Sb, he found no large discrete change in length either on cooling through T c
or on the destruction of superconductivity by a magnetic field at 4.2 K. These results were
difficult to interpret, there being no theory of superconductivity at that time. He also observed
a T 3 expansion coefficient above T c , changing to a coefficient linear in T below T c . He also
carried out experiments on alloy systems, mainly of Pb and Sn with gold (Au) and silver (Ag),
correlating the variation of T c and residual electrical resistance both with the concentration of
the non-superconductive constituents Au and Ag and with their alloy phase diagrams.
This was followed by an investigation (7) of persistent currents, during which it was
observed, as expected, that the strength of induced persistent currents in superconducting rings
was determined by the ring geometry and not by the metal in the ring.
McLennan was due to give a Friday Evening Discourse at the Royal Institution in London
in June 1932 on matter at very low temperatures. Jack built a special persistent-current
cryostat, which McLennan took to London. The helium Dewar contained a small lead ring
about 2.5 cm in diameter in which a persistent current could be induced, which could be
detected by an external compass needle. The persistent current was induced by placing the
 12 Biographical Memoirs

lead ring, with T c = 7.2 K, in a helium bath at 4.2 K and in a magnetic field higher than H c , the
critical field for destruction of superconductivity at 4.2 K. The external field was then lowered
to zero, thereby inducing the persistent current when the field fell below H c .
On the morning of the discourse, the cryostat was flown to Leiden in an open-cockpit
plane piloted by the record-breaking air pioneer William Forbes-Sempill—later the nineteenth
Lord Sempill of Craigevar. There it was filled with liquid helium and liquid nitrogen at the
Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratory, and the persistent current induced in the lead ring. It was then
carried back in the plane by Flim, the Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratory technician, holding the
cryostat assembly in his lap. They arrived at Hendon airfield and took a taxi to the Royal
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Institution, where they arrived just as the lecture was starting, the persistent current still going
strong. It was the first time liquid helium and superconductivity had been demonstrated in
Britain.
In September 1933 Jack married Helen Elphriede Hiebent, of Mennonite extraction and
daughter of a surgeon in Winnipeg. They had one adopted son, who became a businessman
in Cambridge. Their marriage was dissolved in 1947 when Jack moved from Cambridge to St
Andrews.

Cambridge
Jack completed his PhD in 1933 and in the same year was awarded a US National Research
Council (NRC) fellowship for two years. He hoped the NRC fellowship would enable him to
study in Cambridge with Piotr Kapitza FRS, who replied with a welcoming letter.* Kapitza
added that the main interest of his group was
in magnetic research and its extension to very low temperatures, and no doubt with your
experience in this line will enable you to start straight away on some work.
However, the NRC required the fellowship to be held in the USA, and so he went to CalTech.
Jack’s time at CalTech was not fruitful scientifically, but he had the benefit of meeting
many leading physicists and theorists—Theodore von Kármán (ForMemRS 1946), Robert
Oppenheimer (ForMemRS 1962), Linus Pauling (ForMemRS 1948) and many others.
In 1934 Kapitza completed construction of his helium liquefier, just before the opening in
Cambridge of the Mond Laboratory for high magnetic field and low temperature research.
Kapitza went to the USSR for the summer, but as soon as he arrived he was informed that he
would not be allowed to return to Cambridge, for reasons discussed in the book, Kapitza in
Moscow and Cambridge (Boag et al. 1990). A significant incentive for Kapitza to remain in
the USSR was the provision of a new Moscow Centre for Low Temperature Physics, which
became the Institute for Physical Problems.
In 1935, after two years at CalTech, Jack wrote to Ernest Rutherford FRS enquiring if
he could come to the Cavendish Laboratory. In reply, Rutherford explained that he was not
in a position to offer him a job,† but he would be welcome to come with the possibility of
earning money by demonstrating. When it became evident that Kapitza would not return,
John Cockcroft (FRS 1936) was appointed head of the Mond Laboratory. In December 1935
the Royal Society, which had funded Kapitza’s professorship, agreed to split it in half, one
half funding Jack as an experimentalist and the other half funding Rudolf Peierls (FRS 1945),

* JFA Archive Box 2/4. Jack Allen’s papers are held in the St Andrews University Archives.
† JFA Archive Box 2/4.
 John Frank Allen 13
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Figure 1. The 1937 Cavendish Laboratory staff–research student photograph. Jack is fifth from the right
in the second row, which also includes colleagues in the Low Temperature Group: Rudolf Peierls (FRS
1945), Edward Shire and David Shoenberg (FRS 1953). In the front row, J. J. Thomson FRS, Ernest
Rutherford FRS and John Cockcroft FRS are seated. In the second top row on the right, Misener and
Zaki-Uddin are standing (copyright © Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge).

a refugee from Nazi oppression, as a theorist. Jack supplemented this modest income by
demonstrating in practical classes, supervising undergraduates, examining, taking research
students and so on (figure 1).
Although Cockcroft was formally head of the Mond Laboratory, Rutherford asked Jack
to run the research activities of the Mond. Cockcroft arranged for the transfer to Moscow of
almost all Kapitza’s equipment, which was bought and paid for by the Soviet authorities. The
exception was Kapitza’s helium liquefier, but it was agreed that the technician running the
liquefier should go to Moscow to help Kapitza build a new one.
Jack’s first project was to build a magnetic cooling cryostat, aiming at finding out whether
only the electron spins cooled or whether the lattice cooled as well. Quite soon he showed
that the lattice followed the spins rather rapidly on cooling by demagnetization. Walter
Heitler (FRS 1948) had predicted that the spin–lattice relaxation time changes as the inverse
 14 Biographical Memoirs
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Figure 2. Jack with the apparatus he used to measure the viscosity of superfluid helium (copyright ©
Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge).

temperature squared with a coefficient greatly at variance with Jack’s experimental results.
Edward Shire and Jack set about measuring the time constant more precisely (9, 14). They
built a small ‘bomb’, a tube about 1 cm in diameter and about 10 cm long, filled with granules
of ferric alum and helium gas at 50 atmospheres pressure sealed at room temperature. A
phosphor-bronze wire thermometer was wrapped around it, insulated by cigarette paper and
nail varnish. After the main stage of demagnetization reached about 50 mK, a small 100 Oe
solenoid was brought up around the Dewar. With the solenoid current on, the temperature
went up to about l00 mK. Then the current was switched off and the resistance monitored
with a Duddell vibrating galvanometer. The temperature drifted back exponentially to half its
initial value in about 1 s. Heitler’s estimate was out by at least three orders of magnitude.
A few years later, J. H. Van Vleck (ForMemRS 1967) corrected the Heitler coefficient,
showing it was more appropriate to nuclear spin–lattice relaxation, which was later found
to be the case. Shire and Jack were the first to study the spin–lattice relaxation problem.
Meanwhile, Cockcroft asked Jack to help an Indian research student, M. Zaki-Uddin, whom
Cockcroft had put on to the problem of the high thermal conductivity of HeII. The Leiden
group had reported that, when the bath temperature dropped below T λ , the conductivity
became too great to measure. Earlier, in 1930, Keesom and van der Ende observed quite
accidentally that liquid HeII passed remarkably easily through extremely small leaks. This
observation indicated an enormous drop in the viscosity when the temperature of helium was
below the λ-point (Keesom & van den Ende 1930).
 John Frank Allen 15

In 1936 Jack was joined by Don Misener as a graduate student from Toronto supported
by an 1851 Scholarship. Misener had already participated in an impressive study of the
shear viscosity of liquid helium just below the transition temperature using the decay time
of torsional oscillations of a rotating cylinder immersed in liquid HeII. The viscosity was
found to decrease abruptly below the transition threshold from HeI to HeII. This was evidence
that HeII behaved quite differently from a classical fluid (Wilhelm et al. 1935).
In 1937 Jack and his colleagues made pioneering investigations of the thermal conductivity
of helium in thin glass capillaries. The rate of heat transfer was found to be very large indeed
and was not proportional to the applied temperature gradient. Later that year, Jack and Misener
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measured the viscosity of HeII in thin glass capillaries and discovered that it had vanished
completely, establishing the phenomenon of superfluidity (figure 2) (11).
Meanwhile, Kapitza was pursuing a similar line of research in Moscow, stimulated by the
papers of Keesom & Keesom (1936) and of Allen, Peierls & Uddin (10). Kapitza’s original
hypothesis was that the heat transport might be associated with convection, in which case the
viscosity would be extremely low. To measure the effect, the liquid flow had to take place
along very fine channels, or between two optically flat surfaces, separated by 1 µm or less.
The viscosity was found to be many orders of magnitude less than expected; only an upper
limit being obtained for the coefficient of viscosity, consistent with Jack’s results (11) (Kapitza
1938). The papers by Allen & Misener and by Kapitza appeared back-to-back in Nature.
Jack attempted to measure the thermal conductivity of HeII by placing it in a coiled-up
glass capillary open to the helium bath at the cold end, and with a vertical bulb and sealed-
through heater at the other hot end. The whole apparatus was sealed in a large glass bulb,
produced by the expert Cavendish glass blower, Felix Niedergesass. Jack monitored the bath
and bulb levels of HeII by a cathetometer, using the helium vapour pressure as a thermometer.
Jack described the design of the experiment as very fortunate. He had originally planned to
measure the temperatures using electric thermometer resistance wire, but had used up the
last bit in demagnetization experiments and so had to use level differences due to changes in
vapour pressure. What happened next is best told in Jack’s own words:

We found that the heat flow was not proportional to the temperature rise in the bulb, which
astonished us (10). Then, going to the narrower capillary, I found, again to my astonishment,
that on heating, the liquid level actually stood higher in the bulb than in the bath. This not only
implied the nonsense of being cooler on heating, but showed a rise in level which corresponded
to a temperature below 0 K!
Rather than attempt to break the Second Law of thermodynamics as well as the Third Law,
I next tried a completely open-topped heater bulb so that the vapour pressure was that of the
bath. Again the level rose! Also in the helium bath I had put a tube with a swelling at the bottom
containing emery powder to observe flow through powder, a totally different experiment. While
adjusting the powder-filled tube to be in front of the clear strip in the dewar, and shining a pocket
torch on it to help the adjustment, the beam from the torch warmed the emery powder and a
fountain spurted out of the top of the tube – the first fountain, about 2 mm high (figure 3a) (12)!
I rushed around, bringing everybody in the lab to see it, and I photographed it. It was very
exciting and I remember having a funny sensation like bees buzzing in my head. Then by the next
week I had designed and Felix had blown a proper fountain tube, again using thermal radiation as
a heat source, which gave a spectacular fountain about 10 cm high.
At the next Royal Society Conversazione I took a cryostat and vacuum pump and gas recovery
balloon and demonstrated the fountain, letting the onlookers stop the fountain by interposing a
 16 Biographical Memoirs

(a) (b)
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Figure 3. The fountain effect is a manifestation of the two-fluid character of liquid HeII below the
superfluid transition temperature of 2.19 K. (a) The original apparatus as illustrated in Nature in 1938
(12). (b) A much improved image of the fountain effect taken from a late edition of Jack’s cine film
‘Superfluid helium’ (24). (Courtesy of the University of St Andrews.)

hand in the beam of light and heat from the illuminating lamp. I remember Sir Ralph Fowler
[FRS], Paul Dirac [FRS] and H.G. Wells being much impressed.

In the following month, February 1938, Jack and Harry Jones (FRS 1952) published their
observation of the fountain effect (12). Jack quickly found other dramatic manifestations of
superfluidity, all of which involved the counterflow of the normal and superfluid components,
or the ‘clamping’ of the normal component with fine powder. With James Reekie, for example,
he demonstrated that the momentum flux of the superfluid was in the opposite direction to the
heat flow (16).
During this period Jack corresponded with Peierls, Làszlà Tisza—whose two-fluid
description predated the more complete analysis by Lev Landau (ForMemRS 1960)—and
Arie Bijl about the interpretation of these results.* It is now known that the effect demonstrates
that HeII behaves as if it were a mixture of superfluid and non-superfluid helium, obeying the
two-fluid equations proposed by Landau (1941). At the time Jack held an alternative view that
there were two different motions within the fluid, one connected with a layer that covered all
solid surfaces and could move fast without viscosity and the other occurring within the bulk of
the liquid away from the walls. This surface layer had been observed to exist above the bulk

* JFA Archive Box 4/Correspondence on Liquid Helium.

 John Frank Allen 17

liquid levels by Daunt and Kurt Alfred Georg Mendelssohn (FRS 1951), confirming an earlier
suggestion by Rollin and Franz Eugen Simon (FRS 1941) of 1936. In the paper by Daunt &
Mendelssohn (1939), they added a note
Note added in proof. A continuation of our experiments (to be published shortly) and recent results
on the capillary flow [(12)] as well as theoretical considerations (London, 1938) seem indeed to
indicate that the transport phenomena in the bulk liquid are caused by a surface flow below the
liquid level similar to that described in this paper.

Jack agreed with this. This model was tested by Jack and Reekie (17) in their last paper before
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the War. The apparatus was designed to measure separately the pressure near the wall and
within the interior of a capillary carrying a heat current. They concluded that
The experiments described above help to confirm the ideas previously advanced with regard to the
fountain effect, namely, that it is associated with the surface of the channel. Although the surface
component can be understood from F. London’s hypothesis of HeII, based on considerations of
Bose-Einstein condensation phenomena, the volume effect presents a further complexity. Much
more research will be necessary before a clear theoretical picture of HeII can be produced.

Fritz London’s paper (London 1938), to which they refer, contain in Section 4,
‘Thermomechanical effect’, a justification of the existence of this surface film of thickness
100 Å or more owing to the van der Waals forces at the wall, and which moves up the
temperature gradient while the liquid further from the wall moves in the other direction. It
is a two-fluid model, but one in which the two components are spatially separated. Heinz
London (FRS 1961) also supported this model (London 1939).
Tisza wrote to Jack,* thanking him for his letter, but asking detailed questions about how
he had distinguished between the viscosities of the ‘wall part’ and ‘bulk part’ and preferring
his temperature dependence of a superfluid fraction to Jack’s ‘strong temperature dependence
of the viscosity of the wall part’. It is not known what Jack’s letters to Tisza contained. It
appears that Jack continued to prefer the explanation supported by Fritz and Heinz London.
It is easy to think of the 1930s in terms of the success of Landau’s two-fluid model (Landau
1941), but in the heat of that fast-moving research area it must have been very difficult to find
a best explanation.
In later years, Jack said that, although he had measured the speed of heat pulses in HeII
with E. Ganz (15), he had missed the opportunity to measure the speed of ‘heat waves’, which
Tisza had predicted on the basis of his two-fluid model and suggested to Jack in a letter of
27 May 1939.† They timed a heat pulse sent along a capillary filled with HeII and found it to
be of the order of 104 cm s−1 , of the correct order of magnitude of the effect. Jack annotated
the letter on 23 November 1977: ‘Pity the war came along. I might have got second sound.’
Second sound was the name given by Landau and it was subsequently measured by Peshkov
(1944). In September 1938, Jack wrote a review of low temperature physics (13) in which he
briefly reviewed the various theories of HeII and also of superconductivity, writing that a lot
more research was required to understand these mysterious phenomena.
One of the first papers Jack wrote after taking the chair at St Andrews University was a
review of a conference at MIT (18), in which he reported that the superfluid properties of HeII

* 23 Feb 1939 letter in JFA Archive Box 4/Correspondence on Liquid Helium.

† JFA Archive Box 4/Correspondence on Liquid Helium.
 18 Biographical Memoirs

were ‘most conveniently’ described by Landau’s two-fluid model. He also noted early helium
experiments that contrasted the differing behaviours of bosonic He4 and fermionic He3 , the
latter not showing a phase transition near the T λ of He4 .
Kapitza was awarded the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics ‘for his basic inventions and
discoveries in the area of low-temperature physics’. Discussion of the circumstances
surrounding the award of the Nobel Prize to Kapitza are contained in the articles by Sébastien
Balibar (Balibar 2007) and Allan Griffin (Griffin 2008). Jack received a letter from Kapitza,*
in which he wrote:
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Thank you very much for your letter of congratulations on the Nobel Prize and for your kind
words. I would like to send you our best wishes for the New Year. Yours sincerely.
In 1984, after Kapitza’s death, Jack wrote in the Physics Bulletin:
In 1978 Kapitza was awarded the Nobel Prize for his experimental work in uncovering the key
phenomena in superfluid helium. Important though that work was, it represented but a small part
of his activities.

The war years

With the outbreak of the Second World War, like most Cavendish researchers, Jack was
assigned to war work. His first project concerned the provision of oxygen for high-flying
bomber crews. It produced 98% pure oxygen, but did not go into service since bottled oxygen
became available for each crew member.
Jack’s major contributions were related to the physics of proximity fuses for anti-aircraft
shells. Simply aiming to hit enemy aircraft with a shell has a very low probability of success,
but if the shell explodes close to the target, that would be sufficient to destroy aircraft. To
do this, the electronic variable-time fuse was invented to determine when the fuse should be
ignited after leaving the gun nozzle.
Jack’s contributions concerned measuring the huge accelerations involved in the firing of
shells, in both the axial and transverse directions. He invented a novel way of estimating
the accelerations and forces from the plastic deformation of a 18 -inch copper sphere that
was placed in the nose-cone of the shell. The experiments were conducted at the ‘Proof
Establishment’ at Shoeburyness, initially with his undergraduate student Patrick Willmore,
from Jack’s Cambridge College, St Johns. The shells were fired at an angle of about 8o
to the horizontal downrange and then the copper spheres were recovered from the severely
battered shell by driving downrange. From the distortions of the copper sphere, they found
axial accelerations down the gun barrel as large as 30 000g, while the transverse accelerations
were as large 20 000g. Thus, the shells received a terrific battering during the 0.01 s as they
travelled down the gun barrel, in the process wearing it out. They noted that such forces would
be sufficient to shear off the pivots in the gear trains of a clockwork fuse.
In spring 1942, Merle Tuve, leader of the US proximity fuse programme, visited Jack for
three weeks to learn how to mount hot filament glass vacuum tubes in the nose cones of shells
that would withstand the enormous accelerations on firing. Jack knew as much as anyone
about the forces radio tubes had to withstand. This information was critical for the successful
construction of radar proximity fuses in both the US and UK programmes during the Second

* JFA Archive Box 4, dated 19 January 1979.

 John Frank Allen 19

World War. These fuses enabled the US forces to counteract the Japanese kamikaze bombers
and win rapidly the battle for the Pacific, and UK gunners to disable German V-1 flying bombs.

O-rings
Jack was particularly proud of his invention of O-rings. In 1937 the issue arose of coupling
liquid helium in a cryostat to the big pumping line as quickly as possible. The coupling
consisted of two- to three-inch lengths of old bicycle tyre inner tubes tightened with twisted
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16 or 18 gauge copper wire or, in the case of flat flanges, liberal use of plasticine and oil. This
time-consuming process allowed valuable helium gas to escape.
Jack came up with the idea that two ideally smooth parallel plates separated by an ideally
smooth circular ring of precisely circular cross-section should constitute a perfect vacuum
seal. The ring should be of neoprene to give a little elastically. He telephoned George Angus &
Company of Newcastle, which made seals of all shapes and sizes for the oil and chemical
industry. They stated that rings of precisely circular cross-section could easily be made in any
desired size. A week or two later the rings arrived and worked perfectly first time. He did not
patent them because he did not think there were many potential users. He was wrong—every
laboratory in the world now has hundreds of them.
When he moved to St Andrews, he needed non-soldered demountable low-temperature
high-vacuum O-ring-type seals. He went through all the metals in the periodic table and, when
he came to indium, he found himself on familiar ground since it is a superconductor he had
studied 20 years earlier. Indium had suitable mechanical properties, such as being soft enough
to cut with a knife. For re-use it is simply melted into an ingot and extruded into a wire of any
desired size.
Most famously, O-rings were used as seals for the propellants of the Challenger Space
Shuttle, which failed because the low temperature at the Cape Canaveral launch site made the
rings brittle, as memorably demonstrated by Richard Feynman ForMemRS during the enquiry
into the disaster. Jack had written to Peter Mason at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the USA
about the O-rings, pointing out that rings of small cross-section were not appropriate to a
rocket booster 17 feet in diameter.

Post-war years and St Andrews University

Jack returned to the Cavendish Laboratory after the War. He was now a tenured lecturer and
head of the Low Temperature Physics group in the Mond Laboratory, which was formally
independent of the Cavendish. In 1947 he was offered the chair of natural philosophy at St
Andrews University, which initially he was uncertain about accepting.
After the War, the Cavendish Laboratory grew enormously and Laurence Bragg FRS 1921,
the Cavendish Professor, reorganized its management into a number of research groups under
overall central management. The Mond Laboratory became one of a number of groups in the
Cavendish. This was not to Jack’s taste after the independence he had enjoyed in the Mond
Laboratory. The changes convinced him that he should accept the St Andrews offer.

Professor of natural philosophy

In 1947 the St Andrews physics department was at a low ebb, but Jack threw all his energies
into creating a first-class department. There was also considerable discussion about the role
 20 Biographical Memoirs

of Queen’s College in Dundee, which was part of St Andrews University. In 1950 Jack wrote
a memorandum arguing that the urgent national need for technologists should be supported
by a major technological initiative in Dundee. When he began his first term in office as Dean
in 1953, the numbers of science and engineering entrants were falling steadily and rapidly.
He reversed this decline by changing the entrance procedures. He also created the Faculty of
Applied Science in Queen’s College, Dundee.
St Andrews principal Malcolm Knox strongly held the view that all future science
development should take place in Queen’s College, Dundee, rather than in St Andrews.
Jack and three colleagues devised a strategy to reverse the proposal and they succeeded
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in defeating it. Following a vote of no confidence, the University Court reversed its policy
and the North Haugh site was purchased from the Strathtyrum estate for the construction of
much improved science facilities in St Andrews. Jack enjoyed recalling that he had benefitted
from the guidance in the book Microcosmographia academica: being a guide for the young
[Cambridge] academic politician (Cornford 1908). It turned out that the Master and the Laird
of Strathtyrum were both frequenters of the bar in the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, of which
Jack was a member, facilitating the purchase.
The planning and construction of the new physics department occupied the years 1963 to
full occupancy in 1966. In 1967, Queen’s College separated from St Andrews to become the
University of Dundee. Together with colleagues, Jack devoted a great deal of thought about
the layout, and he or they made daily visits during its construction to ensure no unintended
features were built in. The building was completed on time and budget and was on show
in 1968 at the Low Temperature Conference LT11. By then an early Oxford Instruments
3
He–4 He dilution refrigerator had been commissioned and was demonstrated during the
conference, reaching temperatures of 50 mK.

Physics in St Andrews
When Jack arrived in St Andrews in 1947, he started to build up the research groups that
would outlast his tenure. Before arriving in St Andrews, he toured North America and visited
the Harvard group of Edward Purcell (ForMemRS 1989), who had just observed nuclear
magnetic resonance (NMR) signals in bulk materials (Purcell et al. 1946). Jack considered this
an important new research area, and his first appointments at St Andrews were Edward Danter
and a research student, A. Rushworth, who remained until his retirement. They obtained their
first NMR signal in January 1948. Other early research areas included the reflectivity of metals
at low temperatures, ferroelectricity and masers. By the 1960s, there were active groups in
NMR, electron spin resonance (ESR), X-rays, lasers and theoretical physics.
Low temperature facilities were introduced in 1949,* with liquid air being produced by a
Linde type liquefier supplied with compressed air from a Junkers compressor from a German
U-boat. In 1950 the liquid air was used to pre-cool hydrogen. This in turn pre-cooled helium
gas for a He Linde liquefier purchased in 1952. A Joule–Thomson H2 /He liquefier was
designed and built in-house and commissioned in 1956, when a Philips nitrogen liquefier
also came into operation, greatly increasing the provision of liquid helium. This arrangement
continued for the next nine years until the new Physics building was completed.
These cryogenic facilities satisfied the needs of the university and some nearby industries.
The external sales funded the replacement He gas required by the department. Jack was very

* RH Mitchell Internal document, JFA Archive Box 3/4.

 John Frank Allen 21

concerned about future supplies of He gas, and the new building had return lines extending
to all laboratories likely to use liquid helium. Recovery rates were above 95%, reaching over
98% in 1998/99. R. H. Mitchell* wrote that
Professor Allen, who is now in his 82nd year, still works in the laboratory most days, and keeps a
sharp eye on what is going on in cryogenics with equally sharp comments when required.

With few low temperature facilities, Jack’s early research was varied. His research students
included David Finlayson, whose thesis was on ferroelectricity and who later joined the staff,
and David Baird, who studied the reflectivity of metals, both extending measurements down
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to 20 K using liquid hydrogen.

Donald Osborne, a research student of Jack’s from Cambridge, joined the staff in 1954.
Later, as the helium liquefier came on-line in 1956, research in HeII started to develop. In 1958
Charles Kuper and later Roger Clark, both theoreticians, joined the staff and with research
students contributed to the theory of HeII relevant to Jack’s work. Phil Gribbon joined the
staff in 1964 to further boost the HeII research.

Film flow and superconductivity

Over the following years Jack supervised many research students to continue investigations
on superfluid flow through the mobile film and very narrow channels, on motion of negative
ions, and also on the intermediate and mixed state of superconductors. Jack’s long-standing
interest was to understand the origin of the dissipation mechanism in narrow channels and
films where the normal fluid fraction was immobilized by the substrate and almost all the flow
was constituted by the superfluid fraction.
Most work was on the flow of the mobile film that covered all surfaces above the bulk liquid
surface. The film thickness, varying slowly with height, was about 3 × 10−6 cm at a height of
1 cm. Initially, film flow would be initiated by raising or lowering a beaker and observing the
inner and outer levels with a cathetometer. The general features were that, for level differences
greater than 0.1 mm, the critical velocity was about 30 cm s−1 and largely independent of the
level difference. Below this flow rate, such as when the levels oscillated about the equilibrium
level, the dissipation could be explained by thermal effects arising from temperature changes
due to the flow of superfluid not carrying any entropy.
All the data showed that, for a given setup, flow rates were variable over a small range and
sometimes were constant between quite sharp transitions (19, 20). There were a number of
theories developed for the dissipative mechanism, which involved the nucleation of quantized
vorticity, but none addressed the variability.
From the 1960s until his retirement in 1978, Jack’s group sought to develop increasingly
precise ways of controlling and measuring the flow and extending the temperature range.
Capacitance level detectors increased the resolution to a few microns and one-tenth of a
second, confirming the observation of constant flow rates with sharp transitions. First, a
bellows controlled from outside the cryostat was added to the base of the beaker, enabling
the level to be either changed stepwise or ramped to explore flows below the critical rate.
Later, the bellows were replaced by an electrostatic drive that allowed very precise steps,
pulses and ramps as well as positive and negative feedback proportional to the actual flow
rate. The temperature range was extended down to 11 mK using a demagnetization cryostat.

* Newsletter, 1990, of an unidentified commercial firm, JFA Archive Box 4.

 22 Biographical Memoirs

An attempt was made to try to follow up the use of negative ions as a probe of vorticity in
the film (Maraviglia 1967; Bianconi & Maraviglia 1969), but could not confirm its utility
(Kennedy 1972). No satisfactory way of monitoring the vorticity in the film was developed.
Dissipation was not a one-stage process, but involved the creation, movement and
annihilation of vorticity. By the time Jack retired, J. G. M. Armitage and C. J. Adie (Armitage
& Adie 1981) had developed simulations of vortex creation and movement that showed the
extent to which the area of dissipation could, below 1 K, extend downstream and, in the case
of driven oscillations, reproduce some of the variability observed.
Jack also retained his interest in superconductivity. For example, with B. J. Mukherjee and
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D. G. Baird (21), they successfully accounted for the return of resistance of a wire carrying
a current higher than the critical current by modelling the intermediate state structures of the
normal and superconducting regions in wires. Research in the structure of the intermediate
state of type I superconductors was carried out in the period 1965 to 1975 (22, 23).

Helium recovery
In 1958 Jack read in a newspaper that a large pipeline was being built from Texas to Detroit
and Chicago to carry methane for electric power and for domestic use. The gas contained 2%
of helium. He contacted John Bardeen (ForMemRS 1973) at the University of Illinois and Jan
de Boer at Amsterdam, who agreed to ask the US Government to pay the gas companies to
install gas separation plants to save the helium. They explained that failure to save the helium
could have serious consequences because the gas wells then providing helium for scientific
and industrial usage were in Eastern Europe and were expected to run out by about 1980.
The lobbying was successful, and by 1960 gas liquefaction plants were in operation in
Amarillo to separate the helium from the methane and about 10% of nitrogen, which was also
in the gas. By 1970 they had saved some three million cubic feet of helium and pumped it
back into empty gas wells. A total of $325 000 000 had been spent on the project when it
ended because gas wells in Arizona and Colorado were found with as much as 6% helium,
undercutting the Texas price.

Student support
When the new Physics building in St Andrews became operational in 1965, the increased
numbers of students led Jack to set up a ‘Student–Staff Council’. It was the first in the
university and one of the earliest in the UK. The students were also responsible for organizing
a questionnaire, given out to all students at the end of every lecture course, for comments
and criticisms. The Council gave the students a stake in the running of the building. Since
the Student Union was some distance from the new building, a small shop and kitchen were
designed for the student common-room.
In 1970, he carried out a similar campaign to include students on the University Court.
There was opposition at first, but the Court agreed that there should be two students on the
Court and that they should rank on equal terms with other Court members, with full voting
rights and no excluded business.

Physics demonstrations
Jack did not do much hands-on experimental research on coming to St Andrews, but
his experimental talents were directed towards demonstrations, particularly, to accompany
his first-year lectures in mechanics, properties of matter, heat and thermodynamics. The
 John Frank Allen 23

demonstrations were uncomplicated, direct and clearly visible from the back of a large lecture
theatre. As an example, for vortex rings he built a vortex cannon from a dustbin, which could
fire rings of 15–20 cm in diameter, either to blow out candles at a range of 4–5 m or directed
into the audience to surprise and ruffle hair.
In 1972 he embarked on making films about superfluidity. The first problem to overcome
was that, because of the very low refractive index, it was not easy to see the surface of the
liquid. In the most successful arrangement, light with a cylindrical lens gave good results. Not
only was the fountain filmed (figure 3b), but the interface between HeI and HeII could be seen
and the dramatic difference in thermal conductivity demonstrated.
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Over a period of about 10 years, five different versions of the superfluidity demonstrations
were created as more effects were included and visualizations improved. Copies of his film
about superfluid helium were sold worldwide. He also created films about superconductivity,
including the vanishing of resistance, the Meissner effect and magnetic flux pinning.

National and international activities

After his appointment to the chair of natural philosophy, Jack became very much a ‘committee
man’, estimating that he had attended about 3000 committee meetings and chaired over 1000
of them over a 50-year period. He was a member of the last Department of Scientific and
Industrial Research Council before it evolved into the Science Research Council, of which he
was a member of the Physics Committee. He was one of the initiators and founder members,
and served as chairman both of the UK Standing Conference of Professors of Physics and of
the Committee of Scottish Professors of Physics.
Jack was deeply involved in the organization of international conferences. Immediately
after the war, in 1946, he organized the first post-war international physics conference on
‘Low temperatures and fundamental particles’. In 1968 he organized the Low Temperature 11
conference in St Andrews, to celebrate the centenary of the detection of helium in the Sun and
the golden jubilee of liquid helium in 1908. He also organized the SUSSP-NATO School ‘The
helium liquids’, in St Andrews in 1974. His last low temperature meeting in St Andrews was
the seventy-fifth Jubilee Conference on Liquid 4 He in 1983.
On the international scene, he was a member, and then a chairman, of the Very Low
Temperature Commission of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP)
from 1966 to 1969.

Commemorative plaques
Jack became interested in commemorating the measurement by Nevil Maskelyne FRS in
1774 of Newton’s universal gravitational constant G, using the method of the attraction of
mountains, on the symmetrical mountain Schiehallion near Loch Rannoch. He designed a
cairn and plaque and had them erected at the Braes of Foss at the foot of the path up the
mountain, with the financial help of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society.
The plaque was inaugurated in April 1983 by Sir Andrew Huxley FRS (PRS 1980–1985).
He followed up this endeavour by erecting plaques in St Andrews for notable figures
associated with the town, supported by the St Andrews Preservation Trust. Those celebrated
included the religious dissenters Patrick Hamilton and George Wishart, the physicists and
mathematicians James Gregory FRS, Sir David Brewster FRS and James David Forbes FRS,
as well as Willie and Laurie Auchterlonie, the famous golfers and golf club makers.
 24 Biographical Memoirs

Appreciation
What stands out in this account of Jack’s scientific contributions is his outstanding skill as an
experimental physicist. Particularly notable is the remarkable burst of experimental creativity
from the time he came to Cambridge in the mid 1930s to the beginning of the Second World
War. This must partly have been a legacy of his training under McLennan in Canada. He was
also fortunate in meeting many outstanding personalities in the world of science in the US and
the UK throughout his career, and these contacts must have brushed off on him in many ways.
His research productivity declined when he went to St Andrews and he became a more-or-less
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full-time committee man, which he clearly enjoyed. He deserves great credit for continuing to
support all his colleagues and maintaining the strength of physics in St Andrews when it came
under serious threat in the 1950s.
There is remarkably little theoretical analysis in his work, his preferred research ethos
being to establish the way matter behaves directly from experiment. His suspicion of the
pronouncements of applied mathematicians and theoretical physicists comes through vividly
in his biographical notes. He relished showing that the theorists were wrong, usually because
they solved idealized problems rather than more difficult, non-linear problems of real life.
He enjoyed the research freedom to follow his intuitions and insights during his war work—
he wrote more about these activities in his memoirs than about his superfluid researches
in Cambridge. This is a common theme among many of the physicists who made major
contributions to the war effort. The need to find solutions to difficult problems quickly and
effectively brought out the best in these pioneers, who would lead UK research in the years
after the War. Another common feature of this generation of physicists was their strongly held
opinions and, like many of his generation, Jack was always certain he had all the right answers,
and in many of his achievements he was indeed correct.
After he retired, he continued to go to the department daily. He cycled from his house
overlooking the harbour, often on the wrong side of the road, until a year before he died, when
he finally had to drive. He had a very active correspondence with past colleagues checking on
past events and comments on articles that appeared in print.
He lived very simply but completely independently until he became ill and spent three
months in hospital. He never returned home. When he realized that he could no longer look
after himself, he took the decision to move into a nursing home in Elie, Fife.

Awards and recognition

1929 Canadian National Research Council scholarship/studentship/fellowship
1945 Fellow of the Physical Society (now the Institute of Physics)
1948 Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh
1948 Fellow of the American Physical Society
1949 Fellow of the Royal Society
1979 Honorary Doctor of Science, DSc, University of Manitoba
1994 Honorary Doctor of Science, DSc, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh
2020 Memorial Award for Fundamental Contributions to Discovery Science, University
of Manitoba
 John Frank Allen 25

Acknowledgements
We are most grateful to the keepers of the archives at St Andrews University for providing access to Jack Allen’s
papers. A list of important letters and documents is provided in the supplementary material on the Biographical
Memoirs website.
The frontispiece portrait photograph was taken by Walter Stoneman and is © Godfrey Argent Studio.

Author profiles
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Jonathan G. M. Armitage
Jonathan G. M. Armitage enrolled as a research student of Jack
Allen in 1965 with a project to investigate the properties of the
superfluid helium film. In 1966 he transferred to C. G. Kuper as
supervisor on a theoretical project on the helium film. He returned
to St Andrews to work with Jack Allen in 1968, where he was
employed as demonstrator in the Department of Physics and then
as a member of staff until he retired. His main area of research
until 1983 was the superfluid helium film, but subsequently
he joined Peter Reidi’s group on low temperature magnetism
and developed dilatometers for magnetostriction and thermal
expansion measurements at low temperatures. He collaborated
with Jack Allen in making films of superfluid helium and the
Meisner effect.

Malcolm S. Longair
Malcolm S. Longair CBE FRS FRSE is Jacksonian Professor
Emeritus of Natural Philosophy and Director of Development,
Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. He was
appointed the ninth Astronomer Royal of Scotland in 1980, as well
as Regius Professor of Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, and
the Director of the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh. He was head
of the Cavendish Laboratory from 1997 to 2005. He has served
on and chaired many international committees, boards and panels,
working with both NASA and ESA. His main research interests
are in high energy astrophysics, astrophysical cosmology and the
history of physics and astrophysics. The third edition of his book,
Theoretical concepts in physics, was published in 2020 and the
third edition of his book Galaxy formation in 2023.

References to Other Authors

Armitage, J. & Adie, C. 1981 Vortex motion in the superfluid helium-4 film. Physica B+C 107(1), 215–216.
(doi:10.1016/0378-4363(81)90413-7)
Balibar, S. 2007 The discovery of superfluidity. J. Low Temp. Phys. 146(5–6), 441–470. (doi:10.1007/
s10909-006-9276-7)
 26 Biographical Memoirs

Balibar, S. 2010 The enigma of supersolidity. Nature 464, 176–182. (doi:10.1038/nature08913)

Bianconi, A. & Maraviglia, B. 1969 Ionic currents modulated by film flow in superfluid helium. J. Low Temp. Phys.
1(3), 201–213. (doi:10.1007/BF00628408)
Boag, J. W., Rubinin, P. E. & Shoenberg, D. 1990 Kapitza in Cambridge and Moscow: life and letters of a Russian
physicist. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier Publishing Company.
Cornford, F. 1908 Microcosmographia academia: being a guide for the young academic polititian. Cambridge,
UK: Bowes and Bowes Publishers. (Republished in G. Johnson 1994 University politics. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.)
Daunt, J. G. & Mendelssohn, K. 1939 The transfer effect in liquid He II. II. Properties of the transfer film. Proc. R.
Soc. Lond. A 170, 439–450. (doi:10.1098/rspa.1939.0041)
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Eve, A. S. 1935 Sir John Cunningham McLennan, 1867–1935. Obit. Not. Fell. R. Soc. 1(4), 577–583.
(doi:10.1098/rsbm.1935.0022)
Griffin, A. 2008 Superfluidity: three people, two papers, one prize. Phys. World, 27–30, August 2008. (doi:10.1088/
2058-7058/21/08/36)
Kapitza, P. L. 1938 Viscosity of liquid helium below the λ-point. Nature 141, 74. (doi:10.1038/141074a0)
Keesom, W. H. & Keesom, A. P. 1936 On the heat conductivity of liquid helium. Physica 3, 359–360.
(doi:10.1016/S0031-8914(36)80312-7)
Keesom, W. H. & van den Ende, J. N. 1930 The specific heats of solid substances at the temperatures attainable
with the aid of liquid helium II: measurements of the atomic heats of lead and of bismuth. Proc. Kon. Akad.
Wetenschapp. Amsterdam 33, 243–254.
Kennedy, S. G. 1972 The behaviour of ions in the presence of the liquid vapour interface in helium. PhD thesis, St
Andrews University.
Landau, L. 1941 Theory of the superfluidity of helium II. Phys. Rev. 60(4), 356–358. (doi:10.1103/PhysRev.60.356)
London, F. 1938 The λ-phenomenon of liquid helium and the Bose-Einstein degeneracy. Nature 141, 643–644.
London, H. 1939 Thermodynamics of the thermomechanical effect of liquid He II. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A 171, 484–
496. (doi:10.1098/rspa.1939.0079)
Maraviglia, B. 1967 Motion of ions in the saturated film of helium II. Phys. Lett. A 25(2), 99–101.
(doi:10.1016/0375-9601(67)90365-9)
Meissner, W. & Voigt, B. 1930 Measurements using liquid helium XI. Resistance of pure metals at low temperatures.
Ann. Phys. 7, 917.
Peshkov, V. 1944 Second sound in helium II. J. Phys. (USSR) 8, 381.
Purcell, E., Torrey, H. & Pound, R. 1946 Resonance absorption by nuclear magnetic moments in a solid. Phys. Rev.
69, 37–38. (doi:10.1103/PhysRev.69.37)
Wilhelm, J. O., Misener, A. D. & Clark, A. R. 1935 The viscosity of liquid helium. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A 151,
342–347. (doi:10.1098/rspa.1935.0153)

Bibliography
The following publications are those referred to directly in the text. A full bibliography is available as electronic
supplementary material at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.6818710.

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(5) 1931 (With J. C. McLennan & J. O. Wilhelm) On the dilatation of superconductors. Trans. R. Soc. Can.
25, 1.
 John Frank Allen 27

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