The Professors of the Royal Institution

Abstract

BY the election on May 7 of Sir James Jeans U as professor of astronomy in the Royal Institution, its members have exercised a privilege which has not been used since 1863. Faraday was then the Fullerian professor of chemistry, but he was in his declining years, and Dr. (afterwards Sir Edward) Frankland was elected to a separate professorship of chemistry. Frankland discharged the duties until shortly after Faraday's death in 1867, when Odling became the Fullerian professor and Frankland's professorship was allowed to lapse. The other ‘elected’ professorship in the Institution at the time, that of natural philosophy, had been established ten years earlier; and was not so short-lived. It was created for John Tyndall when he went to the Institution in 1853, to become the friend and colleague of Faraday in the last fourteen years of his life; and it has continued by election and re-election to the present day.