A career at the National Physical Laboratory

Abstract

What follows is a short note by John Martin on his career, which began as a technician at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL). He joined the NPL in 1960 as the most junior of junior technicians and retired in 2000 as a highly respected senior member of the NPL staff with a worldwide reputation and more than 50 scientific papers to his name, either as co-author or principal author. What is perhaps unusual is that having arrived at the NPL with his only academic qualifications being A-levels in physics and mathematics he took no further formal academic courses but absorbed the necessary science from those around him, a long apprenticeship in the best meaning of the term!The NPL changed greatly between 1960 and 2000. It was founded in 1900 with the clear objective of providing for British industry what the German Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt (PTR) had been doing for German industry since 1887. However, during most of the twentieth century the NPL suffered many vicissitudes at the hands of the British government, which, from very early on, seemed to have forgotten what it was for. The periodic reviews of how it should be managed, notably in 1919, when the Royal Society lost the battle with the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) as to which of them would have prime responsibility for the scientific policy and programme of the NPL, and then from the 1960s, with successive changes in name and policy of the departments responsible for the NPL, left it rather battered and unsure of itself.