Manchester University

The University of Manchester was founded in 1851 as Owens College, with the help of a bequest of £100,000 by John Owens (1790-1846), a wealthy merchant who left the money for the establishment of a university not subject to ecclesiastical influence. The "Manchester educational precinct" is a large complex which includes a variety of institutes and halls of residence.

Manchester University can claim three Nobel prizewinners: Ernest Rutherford (1871-1939), who put forward the theory of atomic disintegration and laid the foundations of modern atomic physics with his model of the atom; the physician James Chadwick, born in Manchester in 1791, who in 1932 proved the existence of the neutron (Nobel prize 1935); Sir John Cockcroft (1897-1967), one of the leading physicists in British and Canadian atomic research, who worked for a time in Manchester (Nobel prize 1951).