NOTABLE EVENTS

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 200, 21 May 1931, Page 13

NOTABLE EVENTS

Scientific Centenaries

BENEFACTORS TO WORLD “This year is the centenary of three notable scientific events,’’ said Professor C. Coleridge Farr in his presidential address to the Board of Governors o. the New Zealand Institute yesterday. “The first of these is the centenary of the formation of the British Association, and the centenary meeting is being held in London in September for the first time in the association’s history. It is hard to estimate the influence of this great association on the world's advancement. Its meetings are of a different nature from those of the more rigidly scientific societies, and arc attended by many , who are not active scientific workers but are intensely interested listeners. “Two other occasions I would like to bring before the notice of the institute. Clerk Maxwell was born in Edinburgh on June 13, 1831, and was the first Cavendish Professor of Physics at Cambridge. The fact that Lord Rutherford, of Nelson, is the fourth of this brilliant band should commend the anniversary ot Maxwell’s birth to us, but there are other and wider reasons why general notice should be taken of it. , , , "The other centenary is that of Michael Faraday’s epoch-making discovery of the induction of electric currents. Ibis, too, has a personal interest for us here and, for me in particular, for maiiy of vou will remember Sir William Bra BO i who was president of the Australasian association meeting which was held in Dunedin in 1994. Sir William is Faraday’s successor, though, of course, no immediate successor, at the Royal I nst i tution in London where Faraday s great discovery was made. To me the connection is even more intimate m that oir William Bragg was one of my early "These two men, Maxwell and Faraday. were practically the founders of electrical science and electrical engineering ns we know it to-day. Faraday s discovery of the induction of electric currents by the movement of magnets is one of the solid foundations of all modern transmission schemes. Yhe other was Oershed’s discovery some twelve years earlier of the magnetic effect of an electric current. There can be no doubt that the simple, honest, unostentatious work of these two investigators has had more beneficial influence on the progress of the world than all the bickerings, quarrels and strife of Parliamentarians and their high ideals and ambitions. When to these we add the name of Maxwell, that great mathematician who developed theoretically the fertile, ideas ox Faraday, we have a trinity of inyestigators whose work for the industrial and scientific progress of the world will always remain. It is well then that their names should be known and honoured. The Faraday centenary is on August 3J. At the conclusion of the address the Hon. G. M. Thomson, M.L.C., said that his parents were personal friends ot Michael Faraday, and that as a boy he had seen tlic great scientist in London.