A look back at our archives

Silvanus Phillips Thompson, engineer, physicist, book-collector, Quaker, amateur botanist, watercolourist and teacher, was elected President of the Institution of Electrical Engineers (now the IET) in 1899. This was a time of enormous social and technical change in engineering and technology. The IEE had just elected its first woman Member, Hertha Ayrton, and the profession needed to incorporate scientific breakthroughs that were coming at dizzying speed, while ensuring new engineers were trained to a high standard. 

Silvanus was an ideal candidate to serve as President at this crucial time. A brilliant physicist and an engaging lecturer, Thompson was deeply interested in the education and training of engineers. He travelled to France, Germany and Switzerland in the 1870s and gave a paper to the Royal Society of Arts on ‘Apprenticeship, Scientific and Unscientific’. Silvanus was able to put these principles into practice when he led Finsbury Technical College, where he worked as Principal and Professor of Physics from 1885 

In his IEE Presidential address, Silvanus set out the challenges facing the engineering profession, from developments in electric power, traction and communications to financial pressures and the need for international cooperation. In response, the engineer William Mordey stated, “This has been a fighting address. Dr Thompson has peered into the future; he has seen things that are happening in that future, and he has come here and told us what those things are.”

Silvanus’s legacy goes beyond his work as an engineer and campaigner. He was also a keen book-collector, focusing on rare books on the history of science, electricity and magnetism. He was a member of the private book collecting and dining club, the Sette of Odd Volumes, founded by the bookseller Bernard Quaritch (motto: ‘There is divinity in odd numbers’). Each member was assigned a name and a cartouche, modelled on ancient Egyptian icons. Thompson was ‘Brother Magnetizer’, and his icon was, of course, a magnet. 

Silvanus’s personal library included around 900 rare books, 8,000 pamphlets, a working library of 19th- and early 20th-century books, many sent to Silvanus by the author, and a collection of photographs and autographs of eminent scientists and engineers. The entire library was bought by the IEE after Silavnus’s death and is one of the most significant collections on electricity and magnetism in the UK. It includes a 14th-century manuscript of Peter Peregrinus on the magnet and Chaucer on the astrolabe, 16th century European treatises on astronomy and navigation and a rare edition of Rheinhold’s Methodus Geometrica, printed in Nuremberg in 1598. His library is now stored in the Archives Centre in Savoy Hill House, where it is open for members and researchers to view by appointment. 

Silvanus died over 110 years ago, in June 1916, but his ideas and his collections continue to inspire today. 

For more information, please visit the IET Archives website and blog, or read his biography.