Boys, Sir Charles Vernon

(1855-1944), physicist and inventor

by Graeme J. N. Gooday

© Oxford University Press 2004 All rights reserved

Boys, Sir Charles Vernon (1855-1944), physicist and inventor, was born at the rectory, Wing, Uppingham, Rutland, on 15 March 1855, the eighth child of five sons and four daughters of the rector, Charles Boys, and his wife, Caroline Goodrich Dobbie.

Education and early career
Boys was devoted to his father whose skills he learned to emulate in model making, carpentry, and home-made fireworks at a precociously early age. Probably educated at home and locally up to the age of fourteen, he went to Marlborough College in 1869. There he soon exercised his ingenuity in covertly refurbishing the school clock without permission, and quietly subverting many other rules of conduct without ever being caught. In his second year, however, Boys's attention was focused on science by the tutelage of G. F. Rodwell, who proved to be the great inspiration of his scientific career; indeed Boys praised Rodwell throughout his life and, nineteen years later, dedicated his first book to him.

From December 1872 to 1876 Boys studied for an associateship in metallurgy and mining at the Royal School of Mines in Jermyn Street, London. There he studied metallurgy under John Percy, and in the Science Schools at South Kensington he learned chemistry from Frankland and was trained in physics by Frederick Guthrie. Boys clearly made an impact on the last, for soon after he started work in a colliery in 1876 he was invited back to South Kensington as Guthrie's laboratory assistant. During the late 1870s Boys was also employed as a teaching assistant by Percy in addition to undertaking occasional school instruction, but Boys's inventive capacities soon came to the fore. In 1880 he constructed an integrating machine that embodied the principles of calculus learned from the works of Isaac Todhunter, and, after showing this new device to the Physical Society of London in 1881, Boys soon became a recognized expert in the field of mechanical calculation; he was no less an expert on the physics of bicycles and the Otto dicycle. In the same year Guthrie made him a life member of the Physical Society and regularized Boys's position at the renamed Normal School of Science by appointing him as a salaried demonstrator.

Reluctant teacher
In Guthrie's laboratory in the early 1880s Boys developed a new expertise in electrical science, supplementing the revised 1884 edition of Guthrie's Magnetism and Electricity with a chapter on telephones, dynamos, and measurement techniques. By 1885-6 time for his own inventive work was curtailed since Guthrie's ill health obliged Boys to teach theoretical subjects for which he had little taste, and the number of students studying in the laboratory had swelled greatly. One of these, the young H. G. Wells, later complained for example that the 'extremely blond' and 'largely inaudible' Boys had left Wells largely unenlightened on thermodynamics; having 'galloped' through an hour of opaque exposition, Boys had simply 'bolted' back to the apparatus in his private room to continue with his invention (H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, 1.211). A later student of Boys, Sir Richard Gregory, recalled him supervising only advanced students, and apart from infrequent cross-examinations generally leaving them to their own devices. Boys would not be seen for days on end while working on a practical problem, but upon solving it he would sometimes rush into the students' laboratory whooping like a tribal warrior and jumping over tables in his manic excitement.

Bubbles and fibres
After Guthrie died in 1886 Boys not only took on the demonstratorship of the Physical Society, but also took over temporarily as acting professor. He was disappointed to have to stand down in favour of the Oxford trained Arthur Rücker, who was appointed professor at the Normal School in 1887. Rücker and Boys soon published together on optical techniques for showing electrical stress, and it was doubtless Rücker's research on liquid films that first got Boys interested in the physics of soap bubbles. Boys's expertise in this area was publicly displayed in a series of Royal Institution Christmas lectures later published in Soap Bubbles, Their Colours and the Forces which Mould Them (1890, many editions and translations), and this remains the definitive account of the topic. The prodigious talent that Boys had in experimental matters was recognized by the award of a fellowship of the Royal Society in 1888 and his promotion to assistant professor in the same year. In the ensuing twelve years Boys undertook important research on the properties of quartz, especially as fibres in torsional suspensions, and high-speed photographic techniques.

In 1887 Boys deployed a fine quartz fibre in a radiomicrometer that was so remarkably delicate that it could detect the heating effect of a candle over a mile away. Working at night in his father's rural garden in the following year Boys was able to detect the differential heat reflections from different areas of the moon; conversely, his fastidious efforts to detect terrestrial heating by individual stars effectively demolished claims by previous experimenters to have found evidence of this effect. During 1890 and 1891 Boys further enhanced the sensitivity of his fibres by shooting an arrow attached to fused quartz across a room, the fluid solidifying as a long fine thread of unprecedented strength. He employed these fibres in attempts to improve upon Henry Cavendish's determination of the gravitational constant 'G': finding the environment of Exhibition Road too disturbed, even at night, Boys removed his experiments to the basement of the Clarendon Laboratory in Oxford where he worked alone after nocturnal shunting duties at the railway station had been completed. Between 1894 and 1895 Boys was thus able to achieve a precision of five significant figures--a result that was unsurpassed for decades, and led to his award of the Royal Society medal in 1896. In the midst of all this he cultivated a new technique with a rotatory lens in 1893 which enabled the flight of bullets to be photographed for the first time. Such accomplishments made Boys the doyen of British experimental physicists for decades thereafter.

Boys married Marian Amelia Pollock, daughter of Henry Pollock, master of the supreme court of justice, in 1892. This partnership produced a son, Geoffrey Vernon Boys (1893-1945), later secretary of the Institution of Naval Architects, and a daughter, Margaret Angela (1896-1937), who married Malcolm Carruthers. While Boys continued to invent and experiment with enormous zeal even in the earliest years of his marriage, he was now obliged to supplement his modest salary to support not only his wife and young family, but also his impecunious elderly father. To this end Boys endured the duties of a University of London examiner, and from 1893 also undertook lucrative work as expert witness in patent cases, being employed by the Dunlop tyre company as one of a very small number of specialist witnesses. In later decades his expertise was called upon in a wide range of legal disputes, most prominently in cases concerning Marconi's patents for wireless telegraphy and attempts by J. A. Fleming to prolong the patent on his thermionic valve.

Liberated by gas
Boys gave up his assistant professorship in 1897, also resigning his honorary positions as demonstrator and librarian for the Physical Society, to become a metropolitan gas referee. This slightly more remunerative new position enabled him to continue his inventive activity without the onerous duties of teaching. Not only did he have access to the workshops at the gas referees' official premises at 66 Victoria Street in Westminster for quantitative work on the thermal and illuminating powers of gas, but he also hired rooms in the same building for use as private workshop and laboratory. Here he researched alone, extending his high-speed photographic techniques to the study of lightning flashes, although this method was not taken up in practical application until 1928-33 in the USA and South Africa. Here Boys also developed the many practical jokes for which he was cherished by his scientific contemporaries, firing smoke rings at or dropping water bombs on unsuspecting pedestrians in the street below--studiously avoiding such reprehensible conduct in front of his own son, however. Although a solitary labourer, Boys was not unsociable in his leisure time, being a founder member of the Automobile Club, later the RAC, in 1898. He also frequented such clubs as the Athenaeum and Savile, and was long a central figure in the Royal Society Club, endearing himself to many with his generosity, sympathy, and puckish humour.

During the first decade of the twentieth century Boys's reputation in the world of science was still in the ascendant. He was appointed president of section A of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1903, and acted as president of the Roentgen Society in 1906-7. At the same time Boys's private life became difficult as Marian found his idiosyncratic behaviour increasingly intolerable. Boys could not understand why the sociable and well-connected Mrs Boys objected to his drinking cooled tea from a saucer and not bothering to dress for dinner when tired after work. Moreover, his dogmatic and unorthodox views on the correct modes of handling coal fires and of cooking vegetables cannot have improved domestic harmony. Boys was sufficiently understanding of Marian's romantic affair with A. R. Forsyth to agree to a divorce in 1910 so that she could remarry. Boys thereafter lived as a bachelor, having rooms at Palace Street in Westminster, spending evenings at his clubs, and weekends at his house in Hampshire. Having few hobbies other than crosswords and geometrical puzzles, he spent most of his time in his workshop and friends were often invited down to admire his heroic deeds of invention such as novel sundials and the dipleidoscope for astronomical time determinations.

Following his divorce Boys threw himself into his work in Victoria Street with even greater vigour. He worked collaboratively with J. S. G. Thomas in new techniques of gas calorimetry from 1913, and on liquid films and bubbles in 1911-12 patents. During the First World War Boys gave military advice on ballistics, edited and amplified Jervis-Smith's posthumous Dynamometers (1915), and served as president of the Physical Society of London in 1916-17. It was from 1920 that the ever sprightly Boys's public service became most prominent. As one of the three gas referees employed throughout the entire country as stipulated by the Gas Act of 1920, Boys worked on means of gauging the calorific value of gas consumed in a household, so that its price might be related to its thermal value and not merely to its volume. He developed a recording calorimeter that incorporated a 'thinking machine' which automatically corrected for pressure fluctuations, and worked on it constantly until 1934 when he was finally satisfied with a model that was then widely adopted. It was at this time that Boys, with typically scant respect for orthodox conduct, arranged to melt down both the Rumford medal he was awarded for his calorimetric researches in 1924 and his Royal Society medal, so that he could donate the gold to Marlborough College to finance the award of science prizes at his alma mater.

1935 was a most eventful year for Boys, despite the loss of vision in one eye after a cataract operation two years previously, and a severe impairment in his hearing. Not only did he publish The Natural Logarithm, a pamphlet inspired by decades of pondering Todhunter's book Algebra with a very practical eye, but he was also honoured with a knighthood. At his eightieth birthday celebrations at the Royal Society Club his friend and later obituarist R. A. S. Paget composed a memorable song with the immortal refrain 'Boys will be Boys'. The octogenarian polymath revealed his great horticultural expertise in Weeds, Weeds, Weeds (1937), and did not retire as a gas referee until 1939--even then continuing to act as a consultant adviser until 1943. That year also saw his last paper presented at the Physical Society on a device for drawing ellipses.

Boys died at his country home, Bourneside, St Mary Bourne, Andover, Hampshire, on 30 March 1944, and was buried at St Mary Bourne. He was cherished by physicists for his contributions to apparatus and applied science long after his humorous, boyish antics had been forgotten.

GRAEME J. N. GOODAY

Sources  
R. A. S. Paget, 'Sir Charles Boys, FRS', Proceedings of the Physical Society, 56 (1944), 397-403
Lord Rayleigh [R. J. Strutt], Obits. FRS, 4 (1942-4), 771-88
C. T. R. Wilson, 'Sir Charles Vernon Boys', Nature, 155 (1945), 41-2
A. G. Lowndes, 'Sir Charles Boys', Nature, 155 (1945), 147
Nature, 133 (1934), 677
J. S. G. T., 'Dr Boys on gas calorimetry', Nature, 133 (1934), 710-11
R. V. Jones, 'Boys, Charles Vernon', DSB
Physical Society of London, Proceedings of Jubilee Meetings (1924), 21-3
b. cert.
d. cert.

Archives  
ICL
Sci. Mus., notes relating to gravitational experiments; further notes relating to gravitational experiments |  CUL, letters to Sir George Stokes

Likenesses  
photograph, 1900-40, repro. in Rayleigh, Obits. FRS, facing p. 771
J. Collier, portrait, 1915 [see illus.]
R. Paget, pen sketch, 1929, Athenaeum, London

Wealth at death  
£36,500 15s. 6d.: probate, 14 June 1944, CGPLA Eng. & Wales


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