Henry Tizard

Sir Henry Thomas Tizard FRS was an English chemist, inventor and Rector of Imperial College, who developed the modern octane rating used to classify petrol, helped develop radar in World War II, and led the first serious studies of UFOs.

Tizard was born in Gillingham, Medway, Kent in 1885. His ambition to join the navy was thwarted by poor eyesight, and he instead studied at Westminster School and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he concentrated on mathematics and chemistry, doing work on indicators and the motions of ions in gases in 1911.

Source: Wikipedia