Silvanus Phillips Thompson—Some studies in the “prehistory” of X rays. The Silvanus Thompson Memorial Lecture, April 1983
J. W. Boag · British Journal of Radiology · 1984
Mr. President, fellow members of the Institute: I should like to thank you, Mr. President, and Council for the honour you have done me in inviting me to give the Silvanus Thompson Lecture for 1983. If I hesitated before accepting this invitation it was because I am well aware that the lecturer is usually expected to speak about some aspect of his own research work. It is now some six and a half years since I retired from experimental research and as I have had earlier opportunities of presenting its results to you, I would not wish merely to repeat myself on this occasion. However, most lecturers have spoken, at least briefly, about Silvanus Thompson himself and some of the earlier lecturers gave more detail on his life and work. It occurred to me that a fuller treatment of this theme and of the developments leading up to Roentgen's discovery might be appropriate again today. As soon as I began to enquire into the matter I realised that I had struck a rich vein, for Thompson (Fig. 1) was not only a very many-sided personality himself—physicist, electrical engineer, superlative teacher and lecturer, classical scholar and bibliophile, linguist, poet and painter—but he numbered among his friends and correspondents many of the leading scientists in Europe during the last decades of the 19th century, whose work set the stage for the explosion of research which followed Roentgen's discovery in 1895.