Vote for Yorkshire’s Greatest... Thinkers

IT WAS a comment from a friend that first got me thinking about great people and where they came from.

He said proudly: “Todmorden has produced more great people than anywhere else its size – two Nobel prize winners for a start. It’s something in the water.”

Something in the water or not, two Nobel winners is something most cities can’t boast, and I’ve included one of them – atom-splitting Sir John Cockroft – in my selection here.

He’s not our only Nobel winner and you can be sure that if the awards had been around at the time that great chemist Joseph Priestley would also have had one.

Many thousands had cause to bless unusually-named Almroth Wright (it’s his mother’s Swedish maiden name) – and you may not have been here without him!

Yorkshire has produced the fathers of geology, genetics and English map-making, the founders of great educational institutions and a man who spread enlightenment in dark, medieval times, though few faced quite the tribulations of clockmaker John Harrison to be honoured for their work.

This group of Yorkshire folk have changed the world between them.

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1, JOSEPH PRIESTLEY

IF you’ve ever enjoyed a fizzy drink then raise a glass to Joseph Priestley, for it was this son of a Birstal, Leeds, cloth worker, who first produced carbonated water.

Priestley is best known as the first person to isolate Oxygen and he also spotted that it is generated by plants, but his views on religion made him almost as important.

He is regarded as one of the founders of Unitarianism in this country and also founded the first Unitarian church in America, where the vice-president was among his congregation.

He was born in 1733 and had a remarkable gift for learning. Growing up as and being educated by the Dissenters, as non-C of E protestants were known, he became a preacher and earned extra money by teaching.

Illustrating his own book on electricity he discovered that India rubber would erase the pencil drawings – the first person to notice this.

2, ADAM SEDGWICK

“I cannot promise to teach you all geology, I can only fire your imagination.”

These words sum up the career of this son of the Vicar of Dent who became one of the most celebrated lecturers in the country.

One of the people whose imagination was fired was his assistant, Charles Darwin.

Sedgwick, born in 1785, is regarded as one of the founders of modern geology. As a child he collected fossils in his native limestone country. As an adult he lead research into the geology of areas like the Lake District and identified some of the major periods such as the Cambrian.

He studied at Cambridge and later lectured there. Honours such as the Wollaston and Copley Medals came his way and he was made president of the London Geological Society.

Cambridge has the Sedgwick Museum of Geology.

3, ALCUIN

MUCH of what we know about Anglo-Saxon England comes from the writings of this scholar from York.

Such was his international reputation for learning that his letters were venerated and kept safe when other material was lost.

Alcuin was born around 735 and educated at York Cathedral where he later became a monk and teacher.

On a visit to Rome, Alcuin met and made a huge impression on Charlemagne, king of the Franks, ruler of much of western Europe and the most powerful man of his age. He became his right hand man, advising on religion and learning and running the palace school where he taught the sons of the nobility.

Alcuin was considered the greatest scholar of the time and his advice was sought and given to religious centres across the continent. He died in 804.

4, SIR ALMROTH WRIGHT

IT IS estimated that 125,000 soldiers owed their lives to this Middleton Tyas near Richmond born doctor persuading Lord Kitchener to have them immunized against typhoid.

As a result World War One was the first conflict in which the British had fewer casualties from disease than from warfare.

Wright developed his typhoid immunization while teaching at the Army Medical School.

He also created vaccines against enteric tuberculosis and pneumonia, developed new techniques and refined the scientific equipment of his day.

He was also ahead of his time in predicting the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria: a problem which is so serious today.

His renown and friendship with George Bernard Shaw made him the inspiration for the main character in Shaw’s play “The Doctor’s Dilemma”.

Born in 1861 he died in 1947 and an annual lecture at St Mary’s Hospital in London perpetuates his name.

5, SIR JOHN COCKROFT

ONE of Todmorden’s two Nobel Prize winners, Cockroft got his award for Physics in 1951 in recognition of his enormous contribution to atomic science.

He was born in 1897, the son of a cotton manufacturer, and after studying electrical engineering at Manchester University joined the team at the Cavendish Laboratory under Lord Rutherford.

Cockroft pioneered the use of particle accelerators, using them to bombard atoms. In 1919 he transmuted an atom of oxygen into one of Nitrogen using this technique.

He used protons to transmute Lithium and Born and in 1933 he produced artificial radioactivity.

He took charge of the Mond Laboratory at Cambridge, worked on various projects including radar during World War Two and became a member of the UK Atomic Energy Commission which gave him an input into the first nuclear reactors.

Later he became the first Master of Churchill College, Cambridge. He died in 1967.

6, HENRY BRIGGS

IF YOU remember your old logarithms book at school then you need to thank this Yorkshireman.

Born in 1561 at Warley Wood in Calderdale , educated at the local grammar school and then Cambridge he lived in an age when astronomy and navigation were the coming branches of learning.

The problem practitioners faced was the enormously complex equations that had to be solved. Scotsman John Napier had invented logarithms which helped, but it was Briggs who by simplifying, developing and extending their uses made them an essential tool. The term Briggsian Logarithms was coined in his honour.

In 1596 he was made first professor of Gresham College, London, which he turned into a major centre for scientific research.

Before his death in 1630, he was made Savilian Professor at Oxford.

7, SIR EDWARD APPLETON

WHEN radio signals travel from here to places like Australia they are bouncing off the Appleton Layer.

High above the Earth this is one of the cocoons of atomic particles that make up the Ionosphere which Appleton is credited with discovering.

His Nobel citation in 1947 read: “.. for his investigation of the physics of the upper atmosphere, especially the discover of the so-called Appleton Layer.”

Born on Bradford in 1892 and educated at Cambridge it was there that he noticed that BBC radio signals from London were more constant during the day than at night. He reasoned that two signals were being received during the latter – one directly, the other by reflection. This led him to his discovery, made using a BBC transmitter.

.In World War Two Appleton’s research was used as the basis for the development of radar . He was knighted in 1941 and died in 1965.

8, AUGUSTUS PITT RIVERS

THE Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford carries the name and holds his collections.

Born in 1827, near Wetherby, his original name was Fox, but he took the name Pitt Rivers to inherit an estate which left him wealthy man.

Making the Army his career, he rose to the rank of Lt General and did important work on replacing muskets with rifles. The chance discovery of some flint tools in 1869 gave him a new interest.

He built up an enormous collection of flints from around the world and, just as importantly, developed a system of dividing them into types and putting them in chronological order.

Inheriting an estate in Dorset rich in sites, he began to excavate them and made many discoveries.

His meticulous methods and insistence on a professional approach made him one of the fathers of modern archaeology.

He became the country’s first Inspector of Ancient Monuments and died in 1900.

9, GEORGE BIRKBECK

BIRKBECK College in London bears the name of a remarkable Yorkshireman who made adult education his great passion.

He was born in 1776 at Settle – there is a memorial to him at nearby St Akelda’s Church, Giggleswick – into a prosperous Quaker family.

Educated at Sedbergh School, he trained as a doctor in Edinburgh and was appointed to the new University of Strathclyde in Glasgow where he founded the Mechanics Institute which hosted lectures, demonstrations, classes and a library for ordinary people. He held Saturday evening lectures in the “Mechanical Arts” which were hugely popular.

He went onto help found a similar institute in London and became its first president.. Similar institutes sprang up throughout the country.

Birkbeck was also noted for the early use of the magic lantern in his lectures.

After his death in 1841 the London institute was renamed in his honour.

10, WILLIAM BATESON

GENETICS is a science which is revolutionising our world and we have Bateson to thank for both the word and its study.

He was born near Whitby in 1861 and educated at Rugby School and Cambridge University.

He made a big study of plant hybrids, spotted linkages between different characteristics and also looked into cases where the unexpected had happened: a person with extra ribs or nipples, a bee with an antenna as a leg.

Alongside the rediscovery of research by Mendel this gave him a new insight into heredity and led him to both name and found Genetics. He was appointed professor of the new discipline at Cambridge, but later resigned to take over at the John Innes Horticultural Institute which he turned into a world centre for the study.

He was awarded the Darwin Medal in 1904 and died in 1926.

11, SIR NEVILL MOTT

THE affordability of many modern gadgets – from PCs to copiers – owes a lot to the work of this man.

His great study was the conduction of electricity in non-metallic substances and led to him discovering that some glassy substances can switch from being conductors to being insulators – the so-called semiconductors.

These replaced the much more expensive crystals used up to then in switching and mechanical devices.

Mott was born in Leeds in 1905 and grew up in Giggleswick where his father taught. After study at Cambridge he became a professor at Bristol and, in 1954, Cavendish Professor of Experimental Physics at Cambridge.

He was knighted in 1962 and shared the Nobel Prize in 1977. He died in 1996.

12, CHRISTOPHER SAXTON

IN PUBS, restaurants and homes throughout the land the work of Saxton is displayed on the walls.

Saxton was not an artist, but the “Father of English Map-making” producing work which was as attractive as it was useful.

His colourful county maps with hills, rivers, towns and roads marked clearly on them and ships and monsters splashing about in the sea are as popular now as they were essential then.

Born in humble circumstances near Dewsbury in the early 1540s, Saxton’s break was being trained by the local vicar, an enthusiastic maker of maps. The pupil was to go onto great things.

The Tudors wanted to order their country and Saxton was asked to survey both England and Wales. By 1578 both countries had been mapped in surprisingly accurate detail in his book of 35 maps – the first English atlas.

It was to be the basis of English mapping for the next two centuries.

13, NICHOLAS SAUNDERSON

RUNNING his fingers around the inscriptions on gravestones is how the young Nicholas Saunderson, blinded by smallpox as an infant, is said to have learned to read.

In a remarkable triumph over adversity, he went from Penistone Grammar School to Cambridge where he studied further though not officially admitted to the university. He did become a professor there, though, after Queen Anne granted him a degree. Later he became a fellow of the Royal Society for his work in mathematics and science.

Saunderson excelled principally in statistics and his blindness led him to devise a calculating machine, a sort of abacus, he could use by touch alone.

So a lad born in 1682 in Thurlestone became a friend of Isaac Newton and others. He died in 1739.

14, JOHN HARRISON

IT TOOK the best-selling book “Longitude” by American Dava Sobel and a television film tbased on this to bring Harrison to national attention.

It was fully justified, as this son of a carpenter from Foulby near Wakefield made a huge contribution to mapping the world and safety at sea.

Born in 1693, he naturally took up his father’s profession. Making cases for newly-fashionable pendulum clocks led him to an interest in the clocks themselves. It was a small step to making his own – one of his first is on display at Nostell Priory.

Measuring longitude accurately required an exceptionally reliable timepiece that could withstand the buffeting of a sea voyage and the heat and dampness of the tropics.

It was so important the Government offered the enormous sum of £20,000 to whoever could solve the problem

Fighting hostility and disbelief it was Harrison who got there. Cook used his clock on his voyages.