History -Chemical History of UCL

1913 Norman Collie

Ramsay retired in 1913 to be succeeded by Norman Collie.

The Department now moved to a new building in Gower Place which was used a military hospital in the 1914-1918 war. Its location is shown on the plan below:

	The location of the Ramsay and Forster Laboratories in Gower Place.
	The New Labs in Gower Place.
	The Main entrance to the Ramsay and Forster Labs. The building, now renamed after Kathleen Lonsdale, houses Geology and the Computer Centre.

Collie was a man of many accomplishments, and is known as much for being a mountaineer as for being a chemist. To quote C R Bailey 's speech at the 1966 Lab Dinner: 'He climbed most of the peaks in the Rockies and named half of them. He was beautiful water colourist, a first class fisherman, a jolly good shot, an international expert on china, and had the best poor man's collection in England'. His scientific achievements included two notable firsts. He was the first in the UK to use X-rays for medical purposes, and the picture shows two aspects of a woman's thumb with a needle stuck in it.

X-ray photographs of a needle stuck in a nurse's finger.

The second, more dubious, achievement was the first use of neon discharge tubes for display purposes.

More information about Collie is available on the Periodic Table of the Lecturers .

This page last modified 20 September, 2010