A Lifetime of Scientific Invention and Innovation

Charles Vernon Boys (C1 1869-72) was renowned and celebrated throughout his life as a physicist and inventor, his major contributions to science being his invention of quartz fibre and his refinement of Newton’s gravitational constant. The key to the success of his many great achievements and scientific innovations lay in his wide-ranging curiosity, intellectual assiduity, immense dexterity and skill in instrument making, and mastery of experimentation. To tie in with the opening of the Beko Innovation Centre, Gráinne Lenehan, College Archivist, celebrates one of Marlborough’s earliest and most ingenious innovators.

‘During the 1880s, Boys developed expertise in mechanical calculation, which resulted in his invention of an integrating machine... ’

Charles Vernon Boys was born in 1855 in the Rutlandshire village of Wing where his father, Rev Charles Boys, was Rector. It is probable that he was educated at home prior to coming to Marlborough in February 1869. Graeme JN Gooday writes of Charles’ devotion to his father who taught him, ‘at a precociously young age’, life-long skills in model-making, carpentry and home-made fireworks. Once at Marlborough, he excelled in Mathematics, for which he was awarded distinctions and prizes every term. It is likely that Boys was inspired by the activities of the Marlborough College Natural History Society, established in 1864, that enriched school life for generations of boys and schoolmasters. He may have been enthralled by lectures on The Solar System with Reference to the Plurality of Worlds (1869), and Some Fundamental Physical Ideas (1870). Or by those delivered by GF Rodwell (CR 1871-83) in 1872 on Thermo Electricity and a New Thermo-Electric Battery, and On Space and Four Dimensions. Rodwell had arrived at Marlborough in 1871 to teach science; his initial syllabus included courses on magnetism, frictional electricity and chemistry. As with Maths, Boys shone in science, and it was to Rodwell that he dedicated his most enduringly popular book, Soap Bubbles and the Forces which Mould Them. He writes, ‘To G.F. Rodwell, the first Science Master appointed to Marlborough College, this book is dedicated by the author as a token of esteem and gratitude, and in the hope that he may excite in a few young people some small fraction of the interest and enthusiasm which his advent and his lectures awakened in the author, upon whom the light of science then shone for the first time.’

AG Lowndes (CR 1921-38), Science Master at Marlborough from 1921 to 1938, knew Boys well and recalled in his obituary that he was ‘extremely fond of his old school.’ He gives an insight into his ingenuity, patience and playfulness by recalling a story of how, not long after arriving at Marlborough in 1869, Boys felt compelled to pick the lock of the huge case housing the works of the College clock. Over the course of several months, he stealthily undertook a complete overhaul of the inner workings and, although the work was carried out in daylight and required the help of an assistant to turn the hands occasionally, he was never found out. Needless to say, the clock took on a new lease of life. From 1873, Boys studied at the Royal School of Mines in South Kensington where he was taught Metallurgy by John Percy, Physics by Frederick Guthrie and Chemistry by Edward Frankland. He graduated in 1876 and, following a short period at a colliery, was recalled to London by Guthrie to be his private assistant, and Demonstrator and Librarian of the Physical Society. From 1881, he was Demonstrator of Physics at the Royal College of Science (a precursor to Imperial College), becoming Assistant Professor in 1889. Outside of academia, he acted as expert witness in many high- profile patent cases and was appointed Metropolitan Gas Referee in 1897. During the 1880s, Boys developed expertise in mechanical calculation, which resulted in his invention of an integrating machine (1881) embodying the principles of calculus. Other interests at this time included the physics of bicycles, and electrical science that gave rise to a chapter on telephones for a revised edition of Guthrie’s Magnetism and Electricity (1884). In 1889, Boys created a radiomicrometer – an instrument for measuring thermal radiation that he had developed for an investigation on the heat of the moon and stars. It gave rise to a significant development in his career and in science. Boys’ tenacious approach to experimentation and his dexterity with fine metal pieces and solder resulted in an instrument of outstanding sensitivity capable of detecting heat received from a candle 1.7 miles distant. When used in conjunction with a reflecting telescope, the radiomicrometer (1887) enabled a comparison of the heat received from different parts of the moon’s surface. Although heat radiation was not detectable from the stars, Boys was able to affirm that the heat received from the bright star Arcturus was less than that received from a candle 1.7 miles away.

Key to the remarkable sensitivity of the radiomicrometer was Boys’ invention of quartz fibre, which he used to suspend the moving system within the instrument. Previous suspensions of metal wire, or of glass or silk fibres were not sufficiently strong or were incapable of being adequately refined for his purposes. His method was to melt quartz in an oxygen blowpipe to be drawn out very rapidly into a fibre by attaching it to an arrow to be fired from a crossbow whose string was released by a pedal. The resulting fibres were less than a micron in diameter – a micron being one thousandth of a millimetre. Lord Rayleigh acknowledges that Boys was ‘the first to draw attention to the properties of fused quartz fibre’ – particularly its mechanical strength, ideal elasticity, small expansion, and stability when heated. As well as influencing his own scientific work thereafter, fused quartz subsequently became one of the basic materials of experimental physics. From 1890, Boys set about improving on Cavendish’s measurement of the gravitational constant (G). The apparatus he created for this purpose was modelled on that employed by Cavendish in his famous experiment of 1798, but in scale was one-seventieth of the original, and more sensitive, faster acting and stable against temperature fluctuations. He deployed his quartz fibre suspension in a torsional balance used to measure the angular movement of a beam caused by the gravitational force between large lead balls and smaller gold ones. The accuracy of G determines the accuracy of the measurement of the density of the earth and thus Boys’ refinement of this constant, published in 1894, is considered to be his greatest achievement and contribution to scientific knowledge. Physicist RV Jones has commented that Boys’ work on gravitation ‘showed his exemplary sense of the many factors in instrument design, his persistence in tracing experimental difficulties to their basic causes, and his patience in advancing the experimental techniques of his time to the limit of the possible’. Boys promoted science education through lectures and books that reflected his own eclectic interests. A series of experiments on soap bubbles to reveal their physical properties led to his delivering the Christmas lectures at the Royal Institution in 1890, delighting his young audience with ingenious and colourful experiments. The lectures were the basis of Soap Bubbles and the Forces which Mould Them, his classic text first published in 1890 and reissued and translated many times since. His use of photography for research on rapidly moving objects provided him with material for a lecture in Edinburgh in 1893, illustrated by photographs of flying bullets and corresponding airwaves. Curiosity about how lightning flashes develop led, in 1890, to the invention of a camera with a rotating pair of lenses revolving in a circle at opposite ends of a diameter. Lord Rayleigh explains how it worked: ‘The two pictures of the lightning flash thus obtained show distortion due to the motion of the lenses which are in opposite directions. From a comparison of the two pictures and a knowledge of the velocities of the lenses it is possible to deduce the direction and speed of the developing discharge.’ It wasn’t until 1928, whilst on a visit to the Loomis Laboratory in New York, that Boys had an opportunity to put the camera to the test. He was finally able to deduce from a pair of photographs that the flash started at the ground, and almost simultaneously next to the cloud, thence travelling from both ends to meet in the middle, all within 1/7000th of a second.

Boys was interested throughout his life in the natural world, publishing a paper in Nature on The Influences of a Tuning-Fork on the Garden Spider as early as 1880. His last book, entitled Weeds, Weeds, Weeds, was published in 1937 when he was 82. His boyhood preoccupation with horology also endured. In 1930, he presented to Kew Gardens a sundial that he had designed and constructed that would enable the calculation of time, accurate within a minute, on any given day of the year. Boys received many awards and honours throughout his life including Fellowships of the Royal Society (1888) and Imperial College (1888), the Royal Society Medal (1896), the Rumford Medal (1924) and the Elliot Cresson Medal (1939). He was President of the Mathematics and Physics Section of the British Association (1903) and of the Physical Society (1916-17), and had an Honorary LLD from the University of Edinburgh. He remained in touch with the College and was President of the Marlburian Club in 1913. In 1930, Boys had his Royal Society and Rumford medals melted down to donate the gold to the College to fund the Boys Science Prize. He was awarded a Knighthood in 1935. CV Boys died on 30 March 1944, aged 89. His son, Geoffrey Vernon Boys (LI 1907-11), was Senior Engineer at Kennedy and Donkin, Westminster, where he was responsible for many civil-engineering projects before being appointed Secretary of the Institution of Naval Architects in 1935. He died in 1945. CV Boys’ grandson, John Vernon Boys (LI 1948-52), taught Maths at Canford School from 1958 to 1991 and was a Housemaster. He is co-author of Birds of Dorset (1983). In 2018, JV Boys donated the Boys family tuckbox and Marlborough memorabilia to the College Archive.

Top left: 1872 In front of C1, C V Boys, fourth from right, standing near to G F Rodwell far right, Marlborough’s first Science teacher. Below left: C V Boys 1935. Below: The Beko Innovation Centre