"I was born in Dublin in 1860, but I have lived in England since 1869. My family belonged to the landed gentry class, but I owe nothing to wealth or position. I was in fact put through school and college on an income which a workman would despise nowadays. After attending sundry small schools, I entered Clifton College in 1873. My career there was checkered, but it ended well. I was always fairly good at natural science and very fond of all sorts of mechanical things. I was an honest worker but no use at classics, and as I did practically nothing else for the first four years at Clifton, I came to consider myself something of a dunce. But a big public school is a little world. Everyone gets an opportunity, often seemingly by accident, and it is up to him to take it. Mine did not come till I was nearly 17. As I was intended for the engineering profession, I was sent to the military side of the school in order to learn some mathematics, at which subject I was then considered very weak. This was certainly true, as at that time I barely knew how to solve a quadratic, I was only about halfway through the third book of Euclid, and I knew no trigonometry. But the teaching was inspiring, and I took readily to mathematics. One day it came out that I had been making quite a good start with the differential calculus on my own without telling anybody. After that all was well. I left Clifton in 1880 with a School Exhibition and a mathematical scholarship at Clare College, Cambridge. "After taking my degree in 1883 as a Wrangler, I taught science and mathematics at Wellington College, but I was attracted by what I had heard of the Patent Office and I entered it through open competition in 1885. During my official career I have been one of the Comptroller's private secretaries and I am now a Senior Examiner. During the war I was attached to the Inventions Department of the Ministry of Munitions, where my work related mainly to anti-aircraft gunnery. I have contributed, and am still contributing to official publications on the subject. "I have written a fair number of essays on various subjects, even on literature, but my only extra-official publications relate to stereoscopic photography. I read a paper on this subject before the Royal Photographic Society in 1903 which was favorably noticed by Dr. von Rohr of Messrs. Zeiss of Jena. I have also written in the Amateur Photographer. "I have been fairly successful at athletics, and I am a member of the Leander Club."