Lowry was born in
Low Moor, Bradford,
West Riding of Yorkshire, England, in a
Cornish family. He was the second son of the Reverend E. P. Lowry who was the minister of the
Wesleyan Church in
Aldershot from 1892 to 1919. He was educated at
Kingswood School,
Bath, Somerset, and then at the
Central Technical College in
South Kensington. During those years he realized that he wanted to be a chemist. He studied
chemistry under
Henry Edward Armstrong, an English chemist whose interests were primarily in
organic chemistry but also included the nature of
ions in
aqueous solutions. From 1896 to 1913 Lowry was assistant to Armstrong, and between 1904 and 1913 worked as lecturer in chemistry at the
Westminster Training College. In 1913, he was appointed head of the chemical department in
Guy’s Hospital Medical and became the first teacher of chemistry in a Medical School to be made a University Professor, at the
University of London. From 1920 till his death, Lowry served as the
Chair of Physical Chemistry at the
University of Cambridge. He married a daughter of the Rev. C. Wood in 1904 and was survived by his widow, two sons and a daughter. During and after the World War I, Lowry acted as director of shell-filling (1917–1919) and worked for the Trench Warfare Committee, Chemical Warfare Committee and Ordnance Committee. For this service, he was awarded the
Order of the British Empire and the
Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus. ==Research==