Abstract
IF fifty years ago a Government had proposed to allocate 150,000l. per annum for the furtherance of scientific research, it would have met with an unsympathetic response in Parliament, and in all probability would have been turned out of office as too visionary and unpractical. The growth of the belief in the influence of research on industry and commerce was slow in this country, and was due, perhaps, more to the successful application to the production of electricity and of light of the laws of electromagnetic induction discovered by Faraday than to any other fact. When Dr. (now Sir Oliver) Lodge urged the necessity of a National Physical Laboratory in his address to the Mathematical and Physical Section of the British Association in 1891, Berlin and Paris had already taken action. A committee of the association, under the chairmanship of Sir Douglas Galton, drew up a scheme for the foundation ef such a laboratory, and, after a favourable report by a Treasury Committee under Lord Rayleigh appointed to consider the matter, the laboratory was founded in 1901, with Dr. (now Sir Richard) Glazebrook as director and an annual income of 5000l. The control was vested in the council of the Royal Society, who-appointed an executive committee. Owing to the rapid growth of the work of the laboratory, the financial responsibility became too great for the Royal Society, and the financial control was taken over by the Government in 1918. So well has the laboratory justified its foundation that the Government is prepared not only to make the annual grant mentioned in-the opening sentence, but also to support a Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, and National Chemical and Engineering Laboratories are-not outside the bounds of possibility.
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The National Physical Laboratory . Nature 104, 264 (1919). https://doi.org/10.1038/104264b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/104264b0