Abstract
PHYSICAL laboratories at the present day are very different from those existing when I began to study physics now, alas, more than fifty years ago. In those days they could be counted on the fingers of one hand. They were not palatial buildings, but for the most part consisted of a few odd rooms, wrung from a reluctant governing body by the importunity of the professor. The physical laboratory of Owens College, now the University of Manchester, where I began my study of physics,, was a few rooms which nobody else wanted in Cobden's house in Quay Street, and I believe that one of the rooms in Lord Kelvin's laboratory at Glasgow was an old coal-cellar. The whole equipment of apparatus could in many cases not have cost more than a few hundred pounds. Now almost every university and technical school has a separate building equipped with expensive apparatus.
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THOMSON, J. University Laboratories and Research1. Nature 118, 772–773 (1926). https://doi.org/10.1038/118772a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/118772a0