Abstract
MANY graduates of the University of Birmingham will be interested to learn that Mr. G. O. Harrison, chief workshop assistant in the Physics Department, is retiring after nearly fifty years service. Mr. Harrison began as laboratory boy to Prof. J. H. Poynting when the latter was engaged on his gravitational experiments at Mason College. When Rontgen discovered X-rays, Mr. Harrison, on the instructions of Prof. Poynting, made the first X-ray tube constructed in the Birmingham district and successfully used it to make a radiogram of Poynting's hand. For the next two years, the Physics Department, with Mr. Harrison as radiographer, became a centre to which the hospitals of the city sent patients to be ‘X-rayed', the well-known surgeon Jordan Lloyd being one of the first to avail himself of the new facility for seeing the ‘insides’ of his patients. The rays were also applied to dentistry, the method employed being very like that in general use to-day. In the course of this work, Mr. Harrison discovered that X-rays could be seen, that is, that they produced on the retina (suitably prepared by darkness) the effect of light, shadows of interposed metal objects being clearly distinguishable. This formed the subject of a letter to NATURE (July 15, 1897, p. 248). Mr. Harrison's skill as a glass-blower and his versatility as an instrument maker have been of great value to a long series of research workers in the Physics Department, whose good wishes will go with him in his retirement.
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Mr. G. O. Harrison. Nature 140, 1045 (1937). https://doi.org/10.1038/1401045a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1401045a0