Memorial Tributes Volume 17 (2013) / Chapter Skim
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SIR CHARLES FRANK
SIR CHARLES FRANK
Pages 102-107
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From page 103... ...
Frederick Frank's father, Charles Henry Frank of Poslingford, was a Suffolk farmer, like Medora's father, but an impoverished one, and a number of his 17 children emigrated to Canada or South Africa in search of a better life. Frederick himself became a merchant seaman and sailed more than once around the Horn before enlisting in the Third South African Light Horse (Kitchener's Horse)
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From page 104... ...
The story of their wartime collaboration is well told in Jones's book Most Secret War, which includes several stories of the inspired common sense with which Charles Frank managed to interpret the confused scraps of information coming from occupied Europe, and the extraordinary observational powers that enabled him to detect enemy radar stations from the tiny blurred images on aerial reconnaissance photographs and led to the successful Bruneval raid in 1942. For this work he was appointed OBE in 1946.
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From page 105... ...
A year earlier, Frank had shown that accepted theories failed by an enormous factor to account for the observed growth rates of crystals, but that these could readily be explained if the growth face contained a screw dislocation and that this mechanism would produce "growth spirals" on the growth face. This theory was dramatically confirmed when he presented it at a conference: a member of the audience rose to say that he had recently observed just such spiral features and produced photographs of them illustrating exactly what Frank had predicted.
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From page 106... ...
In his later years he became increasingly infirm physically, though his clarity of mind and his phenomenal memory remained practically unimpaired, and he bore his infirmities with stoic patience. A few hours before he died, on April 5, 1998 (at Southmead Hospital, Bristol, of internal bleeding)
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From page 107... ...
Sources F.C. Frank, unpublished autobiographical note dated August 10, 1984; deposited in the Frank Archive.
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