Silvanus Thompson Memorial Lecture

Abstract

AT the request of the Finsbury Technical College Old Students' Association, Sir Oliver Lodge [gave the first of these lectures at the College on [February 1, Sir Charles Parsons in the chair, to an audience numbering more than a thousand and including many eminent past students. After a reference to the splendid work of the College in the past, and its hopes for the future, the lecturer recalled the brilliant succession of teachers-Ayrton, Perry, Meldola-colleagues of Thompson. Of “the latter he said: “The breadth of his outlook and width of his interests are almost proverbial; his facility in foreign languages enabled him to hold his own in assemblies abroad, and he had a real artistic faculty. He had a love of discoveries in their nascent stages, and became a recognised historian of science. To a man of his cosmopolitan feelings and pacific disposition, the war and its atrocities were a great distress; grief and worry and overwork overtook him, and he succumbed on June 12, 1916-a dctim of the war-having been principal of Finsbury since 1885.”