Ernest George Coker, 1869-1946

Abstract

Ernest George Coker was born at Wolverton in 1869. On leaving school at the age of fourteen, he went to the carriage building works of the London and North Western Railway where he worked for three years as an apprentice, and for a further two years in the drawing office and laboratory. During this time he studied in the evening to such effect that he gained a national scholarship, tenable for three years at the Royal College of Science, London. At the end of his second year he was awarded a Whitworth exhibition, and in the following year he qualified for the Associateship of the College and was awarded a Whitworth scholarship. This he held for two years at Edinburgh University where he took the degree of B.Sc. From Edinburgh he took the open examination for the Patent Office and was appointed assistant examiner in 1892. The routine work of a government office, however, did not absorb his abounding energy, and while working at the Patent Office, he went into residence at Cambridge and studied there for the Mechanical Sciences Tripos, obtaining a B.A. with first class honours. In 1898 he began his career as a university teacher on appointment to the McGill University of Canada. Here, first as assistant and later as Associate Professor in Civil Engineering, he worked largely on hydraulic problems connected with various power schemes. In 1905 he returned to England on his appointment as Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mathematics at the City and Guilds Technical College at Finsbury. Here he stayed until 1914, and it was during this period that he first began to study the subject to which he was to devote the rest of his life, and with which his name will always be connected. It was probably his association with Sylvanus Thompson in those days which first aroused his interest in the stress-optical effect, and he began to experiment with the object of developing techniques by which the effect could be used to explore the stresses in engineering components and structures. His first paper on the subject ‘The optical determination of stress’ was published in the Philosophical Magazine in 1910. This was followed by a paper read before the Institute of Naval Architects in 1911, and by his first paper to the Royal Society in 1912.