Edward Victor Appleton, 1892-1965

Abstract

Edward Victor Appleton was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, on 6 September 1892. He attended Barkerend Elementary School from 1899-1903, and from there he won a Scholarship to Hanson Secondary School, where he studied from 1903-1911. One of his contemporaries at the school later wrote: ‘He was brilliant in every way when he was a schoolboy. He not only learnt with ease and rapidity everything that his teachers put before him, but he also seemed to have anticipated the next lesson. This was due to his remarkable talent, very rare in schoolboys, for grasping the significance of a school subject as a whole. I well remember his gaining 100 per cent, in his first school examination in physics. No amount of success ever led him to rest on his laurels, but his tremendous initiative led him to greater and greater efforts. To his genius he added an almost super-human capacity for sustained hard work, and one of my most vivid memories of him is that he always sought the hard road, the one that taxed his powers most. . . . If he had not been so keenly attracted to science he would have been as successful on the arts side; his reading in English literature was always much wider than was usual at his age, he quickly gained facility in reading, writing, French and German. Called upon to qualify in Latin and Greek for the Cambridge “Previous” examination, he reached the required standard in less than a year.’ The letter referred to other things, such as his being a self-taught pianist, a boy soprano, a clever gymnast, a player of football and cricket, with a sturdy figure and ruddy countenance (1).*