After a short military service in World War I, Kapitsa resumed his engineering education at the Petrograd Polytechnical Institute, turning to physics in the seminar of Abram Joffe. Before graduation in 1919, he started work at the Petrograd Physico-Technical Institute, a new research institution organized by Joffe after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Kapitsa lost his father, wife, and two small children during the worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918–19. In 1921, when Joffe took him on an academic tour of postwar Europe, Kapitsa remained in England at the University of Cambridge as a research student of Ernest Rutherford. Kapitsa received his doctorate from Cambridge in 1923 and became assistant director of magnetic research at the Cavendish Laboratory. He was made a fellow of Trinity College, University of Cambridge, in 1925 and elected to the Royal Society in 1929. The same year, the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences elected Kapitsa a corresponding member. Kapitsa started research in low-temperature physics, and in the Royal Society’s Mond Laboratory, established for him at Cambridge in 1932, he built a new type of helium liquefier based on an expansion turbine.
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