He graduated from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in 1923 and began research at the Metropolitan-Vickers company in Trafford Park, Manchester.
In 1933 he was made Fellow of Optics at Imperial College London and in 1935 moved to University of Bristol as a research Fellow in the Department of Physics. There he concentrated on the development of microscopy and telescopy. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1944.
Royal Society.