Natural Philosophy Collection

Nobel Prize Winning Apparatus

The above picture is the only known print showing in situ the detail of G P Thomson’s Nobel prize winning apparatus developed at Marischal College in the late 1920s. The print was donated to the collection by retired technician John Gordon, who worked with Thomson at the College. George Paget Thomson was professor of Natural Philosophy at Aberdeen from 1922-1930. He shared the Nobel prize in 1937 with the American physicist C J Davisson "for their [independent] experimental discovery of the diffraction of electrons by crystals". Thomson’s early papers in 1927 were published with his research student, A Reid, while the definitive paper on his apparatus sent to the Royal Society in 1930 acknowledged the support of his technical staff, pictured above, by crediting his chief technician C G Fraser (senior, seated in centre) with joint authorship. It was just as true then as now, that effective science requires getting the right people together. Thomson’s experience that good research may come from small groups has been repeated on many occasions in Aberdeen University, though not to the level of a Nobel prize.

John S. Reid