Abstract
THE first Pilgrim Trust Lecture was delivered on December 8 before the Royal Society, meeting in the historic lecture theatre of the Royal Institution, by Dr. Irving Langmuir, of the Research Laboratories of the General Electric Company, Schenectady, N.Y. A brief account of the substance of the lecture appears on p. 1085. It will be recalled that the announcement of the institution of this lecture was made by Sir William Bragg in his presidential address last year to the Royal Society. The scheme for the lectures was drawn up by the Royal Society and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and the Pilgrim Trust very generously agreed to provide an honorarium of 250 guineas a year for six years. The lectures are to be delivered in alternate years in London and Washington by an American and a British man of science respectively. Sir William Bragg suggested, when referring to the lectures, that they might be used to transmit new ideas which have begun to bear useful fruit and give promise of wide expansion, rather than to record past achievements, and Dr. Langmuir's choice of subject and his method of handling it must have been gratifying to Sir William. Dr. Langmuir himself must be congratulated on giving a most inspiring lecture on a difficult subject, and on the fact that he had the courage to begin with the very elementary facts. Thus the first link in another chain binding together the peoples of Great Britain and the United States has been well forged, and it should not be impossible to find means to make the lecture a permanent institution. Such international contacts are of vital importance in these days of strife and world unrest, and every effort should be made to promote active co-operation between the scientific workers of different countries. It is much to be hoped that the approach made by Dr. Bosch, president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft, to the Royal Society, which was referred to by Sir William Bragg in his presidential address on November 30 last, may be the beginning of yet another of these international bonds.
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Pilgrim Trust Lecture. Nature 142, 1068 (1938). https://doi.org/10.1038/1421068a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1421068a0