Anniversary Dinner 1955

Abstract

The Anniversary Dinner for 1955 was held at the Dorchester Hotel on St Andrew’s Day, 30 November 1955. The Toast of ‘The Royal Society of London’ was proposed by His Excellency the American Ambassador to the Court of St James, the Honourable Winthrop W. Aldrich, who said: ‘It is indeed an honour and a privilege to be chosen to propose the toast of the Royal Society, a society which for three centuries has exerted a vast and beneficent influence in the life not only of Britain but of the world. ‘In America, even as a child at school, I became familiar with many of the great names which are inscribed on the rolls of this Society, and I was taught to venerate their achievements. We Americans know how indebted we are in our own progress in science and technology to the inductive principle which was expounded by Francis Bacon and which has since, in every generation, been so brilliantly applied by the great experimentalists of this nation. ‘Restless curiosity about the secrets of the universe, and the irresistible instinct to ferret them out, are just as lusty in Britain today as they were at the birth of this Society three hundred years ago. I am told that when Sir Edmund Hillary was asked why he climbed Mt Everest, he replied “Because it was there”. For this body of scientists, Sir Edmund undoubtedly said all that needs to be said. I venture to prophesy that so long as any Everest, in the laboratory, in nature, or in the conceptual realm, remains unconquered, the Fellows of this Society, the blood brothers of Hillary, will be found assaulting its most forbidding slopes.