Georges Charpak was born on August 1, 1924 in the Polish city of Dabrovica. He lived in his native Poland for seven years before moving to France with his family. The Charpak family arrived in France ten years prior to the outbreak of World War II. After the invasion of France by the Nazi military, Charpak joined the French resistance movement against the German occupiers.

The French Vichy government, which was a puppet regime of the Nazi government, finally captured Charpak in 1943 for his involvement in the resistance movement. He was sent to the Nazi concentration camp in Dachau, Germany as his form of imprisonment for opposing the Nazi and Vichy governments. It was not until the liberation of Dachau by the Allied forces that Georges Charpak regained his freedom.

After the conclusion of World War II and his release from Dachau, Charpak returned to school, receiving a degree in civil engineering from the Ecole de Mines, a university located in Paris. He began work in the laboratory of Frederic Joliot-Curie, a famed French physicist who worked at College de France in Paris, while attending the university as a graduate student. He would earn his Ph.D. in 1955. It was in his time under the direction of Joliot-Curie that Charpak began the work that would make him famous in the physics world.

While studying and working at College de France, Georges Charpak began constructing new equipment that improved experimentation for particle detection. Although he started this work out of necessity since his laboratory simply did not have the equipment he required, Charpak provided the field of particle research with tremendous progression through his work.

His greatest contribution to this field of science was the construction of a multiwire proportional chamber. Proportional chambers are used to detect and track the path of particles and had been in existence in a single wire form prior to Georges Charpak. However, Charpak’s invention of a multiwire proportional chamber allowed scientists working with particles to get a far more precise read on the particles.

Due to his crucial invention of the multiwire proportional chamber, Georges Charpak was invited to work at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics at CERN located in Geneva, Switzerland. This was not the only honor Charpak received. In 1984, he was named Joliot-Curie professor at the School of Advanced Studies in Physics and Chemistry in Paris and a year later was named a member of the French Academy of Science.

Charpak received his biggest honor in 1992, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his important work in the field of particle detection and tracking. The award was given to Charpak in acknowledgement of the crucial role he played in building the necessary equipment to advance this particular field of study.

Read more about Charpak here and here.