Abstract
IN our Supplement of this week will be found the main part of Sir Richard Glazebrook's Guthrie lecture to the Physical Society of London. The lecture was founded to perpetuate the name of Frederick Guthrie, the physicist through whose action in 1873 the Society was formed. Born in Bayswater in 1833, Guthrie studied chemistry under Graham and Williamson at University College, London, and also under Bunsen at Heidelberg and Kolbe at Marburg. Returning to England, he held posts at Owens College, Manchester, and the University of Edinburgh, and from 1861 until 1867 was professor of chemistry and physics in the Royal College, Mauritius, where he had as a colleague Walter Besant, the novelist. In 1869 he became a lecturer in physics at the Royal School of Mines and the Normal School of Science, South Kensington, and this post he held until his death on Oct. 21, 1886. John Hall Gladstone (1827–1902) became the first president of the new society, and Guthrie occupied that position in 1884. Unlike Guthrie, who was a chemist first and a physicist afterwards, Sir Richard Glazebrook has devoted all his life to physics. Born in 1854, after graduating at Cambridge he became one of the first demonstrators under Maxwell in the Cavendish Laboratory, and held other posts in the University. His main work has been done in the National Physical Laboratory, of which he became the first director in 1899. During his period of office, which lasted twenty years, he saw the staff increase from three persons to more than five hundred, and under him the Laboratory came to fulfil its object, “to make the forces of science available to the nation”.
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[News and Views]. Nature 128, 14–16 (1931). https://doi.org/10.1038/128014a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/128014a0