The Right Honourable Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe P.C., D.C.L., F.R.S.: A Biographical SketchThorpe, T. E. (Thomas Edward)
Science
The Right Honourable Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe P.C., D.C.L., F.R.S.: A Biographical Sketch
Thorpe, T. E. (Thomas Edward)
Roscoe, Henry E. (Henry Enfield), 1833-1915
Roscoe’s method of working his department was wholly modelled on that of
Bunsen, as those of his pupils who subsequently repaired to Heidelberg
could testify. _A bove majori discit arare minor._ He gave his lectures
at the beginning of the working day, after which, and whilst the
laboratory men were settling to work, he would retire to his sitting-room
to glance at his correspondence. He would then go round to each in turn,
see what had been done since the previous visit, and give such directions
and advice as were necessary. Although the students worked independently,
and were at different stages of progress, he knew precisely how each was
occupied. With the men engaged on research work, or with preparations,
or on any matter out of the usual routine, he would frequently spend a
considerable amount of time. He always seemed to be as much interested
in the work as the workers themselves, and was unaffectedly pleased
with a good analytical result, a well-constructed apparatus, or a neat
preparation. His boyish love of manipulation, simply as such, remained
with him to the end, and he somehow managed to convey something of his
own feeling of delight in handling apparatus to those he taught. In this
lay the secret of his power and success as the director of a laboratory.
Although his students never forgot that he was the professor—he was
always “Doctor” Roscoe to them—they realized that he was quite on an
approachable plane, and a bond of sympathy and of mutual understanding
was quickly established which strengthened into friendship and esteem.
As a teacher, tolerant of the imperfection of human nature in youth, he
might pardon stupidity or condone carelessness, but he had no patience
with anything that savoured of pretension or deceit. Nothing angered
him more than to find that an analytical result had been “trimmed” or
“cooked.” He once summarily expelled a young man from his laboratory who,
under pretence of making a re-determination of an atomic weight, was
caught hatching out a series of wholly fictitious numbers. And he was
amazed at the mentality of a minister of religion who failed to perceive
the heinousness of such a crime, the fact being the good easy man thought
the procedure was on a par with any other mathematical exercise, and
therefore liable to error. That young man, it may be added, in after
years came to a violent end, for he was lynched for horse-stealing; the
descent to Avernus, as Roscoe would point out, is easy and inevitable
to one of the moral obliquity that can juggle with the sanctity of
experimental figures.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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