William Barlow, 1845-1934

Abstract

William Barlow was born in Islington, London, on August 8, 1845, and inherited from his father, Frederick Barlow, a business dealing with estate and building property ; by the exercise of notable acumen in affairs he realized the business and thus found himself early in life possessed of considerable means. Barlow was educated privately ; he had a taste for physical science and marked mathematical talent, but cultivated the latter unsystematically and perhaps rather too exclusively. Barlow thus found himself in his early thirties with an independence, with a genius for handling geometrical problems of a particular kind, and with ample leisure to devote to the study of crystal structure, which had become the subject of his choice. He had not, however, received that rigid disciplinary training through which most students of physics and chemistry acquire a broad sense of contemporary knowledge of the physical universe. In some respects this was a hindrance, but in others an advantage ; it left a powerful intellect unhampered by authority and led a logical mind to pursue its inquiries into difficult and obscure paths which might intimidate the more conventionally trained.