Sir Alan Herries Wilson. 2 July 1906 −− 30 September 1995...

Elected F.R.S. 1942 30 September 1995:−−Sir Alan Herries Wilson. 2 July 1906

E.H. Sondheimer

, 547-562, published 1 November 1999451999 Biogr. Mems Fell. R. Soc.

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SIR ALAN HERRIES WILSON2 July 1906 — 30 September 1995

Biog. Mems Fell. R. Soc. Lond. 45, 547–562 (1999)

on July 12, 2018http://rsbm.royalsocietypublishing.org/Downloaded from


SIR ALAN HERRIES WILSON

2 July 1906 — 30 September 1995

Elected F.R.S. 1942

B E.H. S

51 Cholmeley Crescent, London N6 5EX, UK

Alan Wilson was one of the founders of modern theoretical solid-state physics. In two

fundamental papers in 1931 he applied band theory to explain the distinction between metals,

insulators and semiconductors and to elucidate the mechanism of conduction in

semiconductors. These ideas underlie the later invention of the transistor and many of the

developments in microelectronics that are revolutionizing today’s technology. After World

War II, Wilson left academic life to pursue a second, highly distinguished, career in industry.

A

Alan Herries Wilson was born on 2 July 1906 in Wallasey, Cheshire. His parents, and all their

known ancestors, came from the region of Dumfries in southern Scotland. The records of the

male line of ancestors give their occupations as tenant farmers, blacksmiths and small

builders. A notable great-great-grandfather, after whom both Wilson and his father were

named, was John Herries, a farmer. The tallest man in the south of Scotland, he died at the

age of 103 in 1872, but did not pass on his height to his descendants.

Wilson’s father was a marine engineer who sailed out of Glasgow in the employ of a

Portuguese shipping line. In 1901 he returned to Britain and married Wilson’s mother, Annie

Bridges.

A year later he became the chief maintenance engineer of the Wallasey Corporation

Ferries and stayed in this post until his retirement in 1933. He took a special interest in the

Presbyterian Church and was chairman of the managers for many years.

Alan Wilson went to the local elementary school and won a scholarship to Wallasey

Grammar School at the early age of nine. It was wartime and, with the absence in the army of

all the able-bodied men of military age, the teaching in the school was very patchy. After the

end of the war the situation improved, and when Wilson took the Oxford Senior Local

549 © 1999 The Royal Society



550 Biographical Memoirs

Examinations in 1921 he obtained distinctions in French, Latin, Greek, physics, chemistry

and mathematics.

At that time it was unusual for pupils at the school to continue a general education beyond

the age of 16; only those who wanted to qualify as doctors or teachers went to a university.

Opportunities for employment on Merseyside were chiefly commercial, and the lower fifth

forms offered optional evening courses in book-keeping and shorthand. Wilson took both,

and he maintained that it was this early grounding in book-keeping that in later life enabled

him to understand complex financial statements with little effort.

Having no firm ideas as to the career that he wished to pursue, Wilson, unlike most of his

friends, decided to stay on in the Science Sixth Form to take the newly established Higher

School Certificate. He had no idea what this might lead to, but on a day in July 1922 the

headmaster handed him a circular with the terse remark ‘you might be interested in this’. The

circular announced that a Merseyside businessman, Robert Davies, had left money to found a

scholarship of £150 a year at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, open to any boy residing in the

Parliamentary Borough of Wallasey, to be awarded on the results of the College Entrance

Scholarship Examination in December. Wilson entered for the examination, taking the papers

in mathematics, physics and chemistry, and was duly awarded the scholarship. He gained a

second scholarship on the results of the Northern Universities H.S.C. examination in July

1923.

In the meantime there had been difficulties with the college authorities over his course of

study. At that time the content of the Natural Sciences Tripos Part I was very elementary, and

Wilson did not relish the prospect of going over largely familiar ground for the best part of

two years. Therefore, although chemistry was much his best subject, he wished to change to

mathematics, and, after much argument, the college agreed to his request.

In his third year at Cambridge, Wilson attended all the lectures in applied mathematics for

Schedule B of the Mathematical Tripos, Part II (now designated Part III); the subject that

interested him most was the newly developed quantum mechanics. He graduated with first

class honours in 1926 and, jointly with J.A. Gaunt, he was awarded the Mayhew Prize, given

to the candidate of greatest merit in Part II whose main subjects were branches of applied

mathematics.

R , 1926–40

Jobs were difficult to find in 1926, but the problem of what to do after graduating was solved

for Wilson when he was awarded one of three Research Studentships offered by the Gold-

smiths’ Company, of £250 a year for three years. Wilson thereupon registered as a research

student in quantum mechanics; his supervisor was to be R.H. (later Sir Ralph) Fowler, F.R.S.

Fowler was a rather elusive man who spent much time away from Cambridge. When

Wilson eventually ran him to earth, he was startled to be told that he could now forget all that

he had learned in Fowler’s lectures on quantum mechanics because Erwin Schrödinger had

just published five epoch-making papers entitled ‘Quantisierung als Eigenwertproblem’. On

the next occasion, Fowler told Wilson that he had a very interesting problem for him, namely

to use the Schrödinger method to find the energy levels of the ionized hydrogen molecule.

This had proved to be a major sticking point in the Bohr–Sommerfeld theory based on the

Hamilton–Jacobi equation, but a new start could now be made on it. All the quantum

theorists in Göttingen and Munich, and Fowler himself, had failed to make any real



Alan Herries Wilson 551

impression on the problem and so, if Wilson were to solve it, he was unlikely to be forestalled.

(To be pipped at the post was a fate that, in those hectic days, befell many theoretical

physicists.)

The Schrödinger equation for a single electron attracted to two equal fixed nuclei poses a

difficult problem in differential equations, and Wilson’s attack, which led to his first two

published papers (1, 2)*, already displayed his formidable mathematical skill. The equation is

separable in spheroidal coordinates and one obtains a linear second-order differential

equation that can be solved in series. Wilson gave a thorough discussion of possible solutions,

the eigenvalues being determined as the roots of infinite continued fractions, but some

mathematical questions (of existence and convergence of solutions) had to be left open.

Time now pressed on Wilson, because at this period one’s future research career was

dominated by success or failure in obtaining a Smith’s Prize at the end of the fourth term of

research. Wilson therefore submitted his incomplete work and was awarded one of the prizes

for 1928. A year later he was elected to a Research Fellowship at Emmanuel College.

Wilson’s work on quantum-mechanical problems during 1928–29 led to three further

papers (3–5). The first two were concerned with perturbation theory, a subject discussed by

most of the founders of quantum mechanics. The third, written with Fowler, followed up G.

Gamow’s theory of α-particle emission by ‘tunnelling’. An exactly soluble one-dimensional

model was used to study in particular the penetration of an α-particle stream into the nucleus.

These three papers constituted a minor, but useful, contribution to the development of the

new quantum theory.

It was at this stage that Wilson became interested in the theory of metals, largely because

of Kapitza’s experiments in Cambridge on the magnetoresistance of bismuth crystals in very

strong magnetic fields ((29), p. 45). Cambridge physics at that time, under Rutherford’s

influence, was dominated by experimental nuclear physics; Wilson has written about the

status of theoretical physics in Cambridge in the late 1920s and early 1930s (30). Having made

little headway with the magnetoresistance problem, Wilson considered himself very fortunate

to receive the offer of a Rockefeller Travelling Fellowship, which enabled him to work with

W.K. Heisenberg (For.Mem.R.S. 1955) in Leipzig, interspersed with shorter stays with Bohr

in Copenhagen, for the first nine months of 1931. The Leipzig stay led to Wilson’s most

important work (6, 7), which has secured him a permanent place in the history of physics.

The state of the theory of metals at that time can be summarized as follows (29),

(Hoddeson et al. 1992, chapter 2). F. Bloch, working at Heisenberg’s institute, had in 1928

found the wavefunction of an electron energy eigenstate in a perfect periodic lattice, which

showed that electrons move freely through a perfect lattice, and had calculated the electrical

conductivity. The wavefunctions and energies of the ground-state band were determined in

the ‘tight-binding’ approximation. H.A. Bethe (For.Mem.R.S. 1957), working with

Sommerfeld in Munich at about the same time, considered electron scattering in crystals and

showed that, for certain incident directions and energy intervals, there are no propagating

solutions for electrons in the crystal. (The connection with forbidden gaps between bands was

made by Philip Morse in 1930.) R.E. (later Sir Rudolf) Peierls (F.R.S. 1945), who also arrived

in Leipzig in 1928, like Bloch considered only the ground-state band in the tight-binding

approximation. He showed that the electrons have negative effective mass in the upper part of

the band, and could thus explain the anomalous positive Hall effect observed in some metals.

* Numbers in this form refer to the bibliography at the end of the text.




His papers contained implicitly the result that a filled band carries no current. These ideas

were developed by Heisenberg in 1931 (simultaneously with Wilson’s work) into the concept

of the ‘positive hole’ that behaves like an electron with positive charge. In 1930, Peierls

examined the ‘nearly-free electron’ limit and established the formation of band gaps; in the

same year, L. Brillouin generalized Peierls’s result and showed that, in three dimensions, the

surfaces of discontinuity in the energy–wavenumber relation for nearly free electrons form

polyhedra in momentum space—the Brillouin zones.

Wilson arrived in Leipzig in the first week of January 1931; other theorists there at that

time included Bloch, F. Hund, E. Teller and P.J.W. Debye (For.Mem.R.S. 1933). On arrival he

was asked by Heisenberg to give a colloquium on magnetic effects in metals; the aim was to

clarify Peierls’s work, which was regarded as valuable but somewhat obscure. This was a

formidable assignment—especially as the talk had to be in German. However, at the end of

January, Wilson realized that the Bloch–Peierls theories could be simplified enormously by

assuming that quasi-free electrons in a metal could form open or closed shells, like the valency

electrons in atoms. Bloch had in fact proved too much: before Bloch it had been difficult to

understand the existence of metals; afterwards, the existence of insulators required

explanation. It was generally assumed that insulators were in fact just poor conductors, in

which the electron overlap integral that measures the ease with which an electron can hop

from atom to atom was very small. In Wilson’s picture the electrons can still be entirely free in

a full band, but in an applied electric field the net current is zero. Wilson explained his ideas

to Heisenberg, who understood them at once, and fetched Bloch, who did not believe them at

first; he objected that the argument would require the bivalent alkaline earth metals to be

insulators. Wilson replied that, in three dimensions, energy bands can overlap, and so

elements with even valency can be either metals or insulators. Bloch soon came to agree with

Wilson and, in the event, Wilson gave two colloquia, the second attended by a group of

experimentalists from Erlangen, headed by B. Gudden, who were particularly interested in

semiconductors. The experimental situation about metals, semiconductors and insulators was

still very confused at that time; thus it was thought that the peculiar resistance curves of

germanium and silicon might be due to oxide layers and that these substances, when

sufficiently pure, would probably be metals. Wilson gave his theory of the difference between

metals and insulators (6) (remarking, ‘we have the rather curious result that not only is it

possible to obtain conduction with bound electrons, but it is also possible to obtain

non-conduction with free electrons’) but he left open the question of whether true (‘intrinsic’)

semiconductors exist. In Gudden’s view, no pure substance was ever a semiconductor; he

believed that their conductivity was always due to impurities acting either as donors or

acceptors of electrons. The mechanism for the production of free electrons or free holes from

impurities was easily explained by Wilson’s theory (7).

In more detail, Wilson (6) calculated for the first time the wavefunctions and energies of

p-state bands in tight binding and showed how the possible overlap of s and p bands in

alkaline earths could make them conductors. He then described a simple model of a

semiconductor and calculated the specific heat, spin paramagnetism and electrical

conductivity. Later (7) he developed the ‘donor’ model of an impurity semiconductor (it

seems that the concept of acceptor levels was introduced subsequently by Peierls, in 1932).

From the Hall coefficient of cuprous oxide Wilson deduced an impurity concentration of

about 1017 cm−3, ‘conclusive proof that the conductivity is due to impurities and is not

intrinsic’. To quote from Hoddeson et al. (1992),




By bringing together the elements of band theory in a simple conceptual picture, Wilson closed this

chapter in the development of the fundamental quantum theory of solids. He emerges as an important

figure in the transition of solid-state theory from its early conceptual to its later practical orientation,

for not only did his model make it possible to begin to approach realistic solids, but because his papers

were so clear, they would be widely read by subsequent generations of experimental and theoretical

researchers.

As it happened, the subject proposed for the prestigious Adams Prize awarded by the

University of Cambridge for the period 1931–32 was ‘The quantum-mechanical theory of

aperiodic phenomena’; the examiners were R.H. Fowler, Sir Arthur Eddington, F.R.S., and

Sir Joseph Larmor, F.R.S. Wilson submitted an expanded version of the work performed at

Leipzig and was awarded the prize in 1932.

Wilson next applied his band concepts to develop theories of photoconductivity in crystals

such as sodium chloride and diamond (8) and of rectification at a metal–semiconductor

junction (9). According to the latter paper, the asymmetry in current is caused by the potential

difference between the components, which changes the number of electrons that can pass by

quantum-mechanical tunnelling through the potential barrier in the transition layer.

Unfortunately, the prediction that the positive direction of the current is from metal to

semiconductor was contrary to later experiment. Wilson’s concepts were next combined with

R.W. Gurney’s theory of electrolytic conduction (10). One further paper (11), published in

1932, proved a blind alley: it criticized the treatment of the electron–lattice interaction given

by Bloch, Brillouin and particularly Peierls, but the criticism turned out to be unfounded.

Up to 1933 Wilson had had no permanent post in Cambridge, but in October of that year

he was appointed University Lecturer in Mathematics, and also Fellow and Lecturer of

Trinity in succession to R.H. Fowler, who had become the first Plummer Professor of

Mathematical Physics in 1932. From 1929 to 1940 he gave a course of Advanced Lectures for

the Mathematical Tripos in the Michaelmas term, entitled ‘Quantum theory of spectra’ and

based on applications of the Schrödinger equation. This was supplemented by a course in the

Lent and Easter terms by P.A.M. Dirac, F.R.S., covering his book The principles of quantum

mechanics. Fowler and Wilson also lectured on thermodynamics. Lady Jeffreys recalls clearly

how her pupils praised Wilson’s lecturing—and contrasted it with that of some others: ‘can’t

hear what he says and can’t see what he writes’.

In July 1934 Wilson married Margaret Monks, and they set up house in Barrow Road.

Their sons, Peter and John, were born in 1939 and 1944. Peggy Wilson, a woman with a rare

quality of charm that brought a positive response from all the people she met, was a perfect

foil to her husband, and the marriage was a very happy one.

The experience with the blind-alley paper (11) might have had a discouraging effect on

Wilson; at any rate, the next paper (12) did not appear until 1935, but it was a substantial one,

giving a thorough discussion of optical properties of metals in the visible and ultraviolet. The

state of the subject at this time is summed up in Wilson’s magisterial book The theory of

metals (31), which was based on his Adams Prize essay. A shorter book, one of the series of

Cambridge Physical Tracts, appeared in 1939 under the title Semi-conductors and metals (32).

Its aim was to give a clear and simplified, though non-superficial, account of the subject, and

Wilson’s books were influential in making available to a wide range of physicists, metallurgists

and engineers the advances made in solid-state physics during the 1930s.

Wilson was evidently intrigued by one tricky mathematical problem in the theory of

metals: that of finding satisfactory solutions of the ‘Bloch integral equation’, required for the

discussion of electrical conductivity and other transport phenomena; Bloch’s own treatment




had been incomplete. In (13) he gave an elementary method for finding approximate solutions

valid for low temperatures. The idea was to proceed by successive approximations, treating the

‘residual resistance’ due to impurities as the first approximation. After the war, together with

his research student E.H. Sondheimer, he extended this technique to the magnetoresistance

effects (22). (The complete solution of the Bloch integral equation was eventually given by

Sondheimer (1950).)

In another prewar contribution to the theory of conductivity (14), Wilson gave a careful

treatment of the effect of s–d transitions in transition metals such as platinum with

incomplete d-bands; this was a quantitative version of a more qualitative theory given by

Mott (1936). Two further papers were published in 1938. The first (15) generalized Bethe’s

theory of order and disorder in alloys so as to include transitions in which the lattice structure

changes from cubic to tetragonal; the theory gave a discontinuity in the order at the transition

temperature and also a latent heat. The second (16) signalled a move away from the solid

state: in this paper Wilson solved the Schrödinger equation for the deuteron in the ground

state, assuming that the mutual potential energy of the neutron and proton is proportional to

e−lr/r, as suggested by the then-recent theory, due to Hideki Yukawa (For.Mem.R.S. 1963), of

nuclear forces. He used the variational method to obtain an approximate solution; it is

interesting that he also found an exact numerical solution by using the Cambridge differential

analyser that had been designed by Miss E. Monroe and M.V. Wilkes (F.R.S. 1956).

During the 1930s Wilson supervised four research students: J.W. Harding, who worked on

magnetoresistance in semiconductors; K. Mitchell, who published three papers on the

external photoelectric effect; R.E.B. Makinson, who gave a careful survey of the electronic

and lattice thermal conductivities of metals; and G.P. Dube, who extended Wilson’s method

of approximate solutions (13). Wilson, who did not like to be a solitary worker, felt that this

number of research students was too small, and the general lack of interest that he perceived

among the Cambridge permanent staff in either experimental or theoretical solid-state

physics led him to decide, around 1938, to switch his interests to nuclear physics and cosmic

rays. The result was four papers, two of them written with F. Booth, published in 1940 and

1941 (17–20). (I am grateful to Professor James Hamilton for providing the information on

which the following summary is based.)

Particles with a mass intermediate between that of the electron and that of the proton,

later called mesons, had recently been introduced in Yukawa’s theory of nuclear forces, and

similar particles had also been discovered in the ‘hard’ component of cosmic rays. These

mesons might have no polarization (scalars or pseudoscalars) or have three polarization states

(vector mesons). The cross-sections for elastic scattering of mesons on nucleons (protons or

neutrons) were obtained (18, 19); similar results were given (17) for radiative processes

involving the creation or scattering of vector mesons on nucleons. The results, which showed

that the cross-sections should increase without limit at high energies, created a serious puzzle

for theorists. Professor Hamilton recalls a seminar in the Dublin Institute for Advanced

Studies in the early 1940s, with Schrödinger and W.H. Heitler (F.R.S. 1948) taking part, in

which the argument was put forward that on account of the mass of the meson one could

always form a meson wave packet having small width (or transverse dimension). Such a wave

packet could never give a very large cross-section however high the (longitudinal) momentum.

Therefore the vector meson cross-section calculations must be wrong.

Quantum field theory at that time was in difficulty. For the weak electron–photon

interaction (quantum electrodynamics), lowest-order perturbation theory gave a good




description of the observed phenomena, but attempts to get higher accuracy encountered

infinite terms at the second order in the coupling constant. For the meson scattering

processes, where the interaction is strong, attempts were therefore made to go beyond

perturbation theory. Around 1938–41, E. Gora, Heitler and Wilson independently derived an

integral equation for the physical scattering amplitudes (20). Because the scattering reduced

the amplitude of the incident wave, the name ‘radiation damping’ was applied to this work.

Reasonable values were obtained for the scattering of vector mesons, and the Gora–Heitler–

Wilson equation thus made it possible to discuss sensibly whether cosmic radiation consisted

partly of vector mesons. What went generally unnoticed at the time was that this damping

theory had merely put unitarity into the elastic scattering calculations; it was usual to ignore

the fact that a perturbation theory expansion of a scattering amplitude in powers of the

coupling constant will not in general be unitary. (For small coupling this does not matter, as

the lowest-order terms are accurate.)

An immediate application of the damping theory was to the principle of detailed balance

in collision processes. If collisions between two free particles are treated in first approxima-

tion, the transition probability from the initial to the final state is equal to the transition

probability for the reverse process. The damping term destroys the general validity of this

principle; an example of such a violation of detailed balance was given by Hamilton & Peng

(1944). Thus, going beyond perturbation theory was a powerful technique, able to give qual-

itatively new results. The modern precise theory of hadron interactions is founded on three

principles: causality (leading to analytic functions), unitarity, and crossing symmetry (relating

particle processes to anti-particle processes). Heitler and Wilson played an important role in

developing the importance of unitarity.

T

When war seemed inevitable, Wilson expected to be involved in one or other of the scientific

defence groups that were being set up. At first, however, his services were required only on a

part-time basis, and his main activity was an enormous teaching load at Cambridge. However,

in September 1941 he was recruited into the radio communications laboratory of the Special

Operations Executive (SOE), which had the task of developing communications between

Britain and the resistance groups that were being formed in the Nazi-occupied territories.

Conscious of his lack of knowledge of radio engineering, Wilson was reluctant to make this

move, but his refusal was not accepted. He soon found himself head of the laboratory, and he

quickly concluded that the task to be accomplished consisted of deleting unnecessary projects

and redeploying the staff into fewer and stronger groups; an apparently simple objective

whose accomplishment turned out to be far from straightforward. In 1942 Wilson was elected

F.R.S., in recognition of his distinguished contribution to the electronic theory of metals,

insulators and semiconductors.

By the beginning of 1943 Wilson had largely achieved his objectives at the SOE, and it was

therefore a relief to him when he was requested to join Tube Alloys, the code name for the

organization responsible for the British work on the atomic bomb.

The theoretical work on this project was concentrated at Birmingham, where the staff

consisted of Peierls, K. Fuchs and Wilson, together with half a dozen others of lower

seniority. A major part of the programme was concerned with the development of the




gaseous separation of the uranium isotopes. In the middle of 1944 most of the Tube Alloys

work was transferred to America. However, a remnant remained in Britain, and Wilson

volunteered to stay with it. Accordingly, he returned to Cambridge in September 1944, giving

half his time to Tube Alloys and half to university duties, including the revival of lines of

academic research that had been put aside until the end of the war was in sight. Professor

P.M. Cohn (F.R.S. 1980) recalls being supervised by Wilson in applied mathematics at that

time, and pays tribute to Wilson’s concise and clear explanations in language that a pure

mathematician could understand. As an example, he remembers being puzzled after a lecture

by Sir Arthur Eddington, who had maintained that every law of Nature was really a

definition; thus Newton’s Second Law, force equals mass times acceleration, was just a

definition of ‘force’, with mass as a mere proportionality factor. When Cohn took his worry

to Wilson, the latter just laughed: ‘Of course it’s a law—just suppose that the acceleration had

not been in the direction of the force, then the mass would have been a tensor, but Newton’s

law tells us that mass is a scalar’.

In July 1944, R.H. Fowler, by then Sir Ralph Fowler, who had fostered Wilson’s career at

various critical points and had become a close friend, died after several years of ill health. The

Plummer Chair of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge thereby became vacant and Wilson

had strong hopes that he would become Fowler’s successor. This hope, however, was dashed

(after complicated negotiations, D.R. Hartree, F.R.S., was appointed to this chair), and

Wilson instead went into industry, joining the Board of Courtaulds as Director in Charge of

Research and Development (see below).

P

For several years after joining Courtaulds, Wilson continued to work in solid-state physics in

his spare time. In a paper written with the applied mathematician W.R. Dean (21), he

discussed Bragg’s model of a dislocation and, applying the classical theory of elasticity to a

simplified model, derived simple closed formulae for displacement and stress. Another paper

(23), announced as the first in a series of papers, arose in connection with Wilson’s work at

Courtaulds, and discussed the problem of simultaneous diffusion and adsorption arising from

effects that occur in a commercial dye-bath. Later papers in the series were published by

J. Crank of Courtaulds.

Wilson also continued with the production of books. A second, much enlarged and

revised, edition of The theory of metals appeared in 1953. Because of the great expansion of

the subject, the coverage was more selective than in the first edition; surface effects,

superconductivity and optical properties were omitted, but there was a much more detailed

treatment of conduction phenomena. The reviewers gave a cautious welcome to the book, but

there was some feeling that the elegant mathematical treatments tended to obscure the fact

that they were based on models that might not be adequate to describe actual complex

physical situations. The book was nevertheless reprinted several times.

Thermodynamics and statistical mechanics (33) was published in 1957. This substantial

treatise, presumably based on Wilson’s prewar lectures on the subject, was intended mainly for

theoretical physicists and was not for beginners: in the author’s words, ‘the elementary

portions are treated from an advanced standpoint’. The book received favourable reviews and

was reprinted twice.




Wilson’s main postwar research effort, undertaken partly with his research student E.H.

Sondheimer, was devoted to the electron theory of metals. One paper (22) has already been

mentioned; this work, based on a somewhat artificial model of energy-band structure, was

later superseded by calculations based on the geometry of Fermi surfaces in real metals

(Lifshitz et al. 1956, 1957) (see also Pippard 1989).

The remaining two postwar papers deal with the diamagnetism of electrons in metals. The

first (24) applied some elegant mathematics to the density matrix for the case of free electrons,

and rederived in more rigorous fashion the results, including the de Haas–van Alphen

oscillations, obtained in earlier treatments of the problem by L.D. Landau (For.Mem.R.S.

1960), Peierls and others. In the second (25), Wilson again took up the much more difficult

problem, first considered by Peierls in 1933 and discussed in the first edition of The theory of

metals, of the diamagnetism of electrons subject to the periodic potential of the lattice.

Wilson calculated only the steady (field-independent) susceptibility by a suitable expansion of

the partition function, but even so the results were complicated and difficult to interpret.

These calculations were finally completed by Hebborn & Sondheimer (1960) (see also

Hebborn et al. 1964).

C

Towards the end of the war, the future of Courtaulds Ltd was under consideration. Until

then, this leading textile company had not found it necessary to have a full-scale research

department, but the war had brought changes. The invention of nylon by du Pont in 1938 had

started a new era in synthetic fibres; in the UK this had led to the setting up of a joint

Courtaulds–ICI company, British Nylon Spinners (BNS), responsible for the conversion of

nylon polymer into yarn.

The advent of purely synthetic fibres made it essential for Courtaulds to start a major

research effort. During 1944 Alan Wilson was approached by the company for advice in this

matter, and he felt able to supply some general observations on the scale of the operation

required. This was followed by an invitation to call on the chairman, Samuel Courtauld, who

(Wilson was told) wanted to thank him for his trouble. But, when he called, Wilson was

surprised to be offered a seat on the Board as Director in Charge of Research and

Development. Wilson, conscious of his lack of knowledge of the chemistry of artificial fibres

and still hoping to be elected to the Cambridge chair, was unwilling to consider the offer. But

much pressure was brought to bear on him, by (among others) Sir Edward Appleton, F.R.S.,

then head of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, who stressed the need for

university men to go into industry. In the end Wilson accepted, intending to stay for perhaps

five years and then to return to academic life. However, there was to be no return. Wilson

took up his duties formally in September 1945 and stayed with Courtaulds for a period of 17

years, during which the company became a leader in innovation.

Within the space of this memoir it is neither possible nor necessary to describe in detail

Wilson’s eventful career at Courtaulds. He gave some account of the problems encountered

and the measures taken to deal with them in his articles (26–28). (He has also written a

lengthy and frank (unpublished) personal account, entitled ‘My turbulent years in industry’,

which deals with his experience at Courtaulds, Glaxo and with the computer industry. I thank

Wilson’s son, Mr John Wilson, for allowing me to see this manuscript.) The major published




source for Wilson’s time with Courtaulds is Donald Coleman’s history of the company

(Coleman 1980), which gives vivid descriptions of the personalities involved, the problems

that they had to tackle and the (often difficult) relations between them. The end of the story,

as far as Wilson was concerned, was the dramatic takeover battle between ICI and Courtaulds

in 1961–62.

For many years the relationship between ICI and Courtaulds had been that of supplier

and user of basic chemicals. However, when BNS was set up, differences of opinion emerged

between the companies and there was some ill-feeling. When Wilson became a director of

BNS he was able to restore harmony, largely because of his ability to cooperate easily with Sir

Alexander Fleck (later Lord Fleck; F.R.S. 1955), the chairman of ICI.

However, in January 1960 Fleck was succeeded as chairman by S.P. (later Sir Paul)

Chambers, who felt that the relationship between the two companies could be greatly

simplified if they were to amalgamate, making Courtaulds (in effect) a subsidiary of ICI.

There were protracted but inconclusive discussions, culminating in Chambers’s decision to

launch a takeover bid for Courtaulds (18 December 1961). This resulted in a furious

stock-market battle that ICI eventually lost, but ending up owning 38% of the share capital of

Courtaulds.

Meanwhile, Wilson had been elected Chairman-Designate of Courtaulds in July 1961, to

succeed Sir John Hanbury-Williams after the Annual General Meeting in July 1962. However,

there was a feeling in the City that the stalemate between Courtaulds and ICI might best be

resolved if an outsider with a ‘big City name’ were to become chairman, and Wilson

accordingly offered to relinquish his position as chairman-designate if this would help

progress. Additional pressure in this direction came from C.F. Kearton (later Lord Kearton;

F.R.S. 1961), Wilson’s formidable rival within Courtaulds, and his supporters. Frank Kearton

had been brought into the company by Wilson himself in 1946 and had joined the Board in

1952. Coleman (1980, p. 141) refers to the ‘antipathetic personalities of the only two men then

on Courtaulds’ Board who combined outstanding intellectual qualities with powerful business

ambition’.

By this time, Wilson had become thoroughly disillusioned with the situation at Courtaulds,

and in March 1962 he announced that he would not only relinquish the chairmanship but

would also resign from the Board. In the event, no ‘big City name’ ever emerged; after an

interregnum, Frank Kearton became Chairman of Courtaulds in 1964.

Before his departure from the company, Alan Wilson had received a knighthood in the

previous year, but had also suffered a very severe blow when his beloved wife Peggy, after

years of ill-health, died suddenly on 8 June 1961.

G

After a period in the wilderness, Alan Wilson joined the Board of Glaxo Group on 7 January

1963 and on 1 July 1963 he became Chairman, succeeding Sir Harry Jephcott, who had

dominated the company for half a century. The ten years for which Wilson remained as

executive chairman of Glaxo were to be the most creative of his career in industry.

Glaxo Laboratories had in the early part of the century pioneered the importation of dried

milk from New Zealand and had entered the pharmaceutical industry via the manufacture of

vitamins. After World War II the company had enlarged its field to include penicillin and the




corticosteroids, and it had recently absorbed a number of smaller companies that had found

that they could not afford to support the amount of research necessary in the pharmaceutical

field.

Wilson, as a newcomer, was not unduly influenced by sentimental attractions to the past

and, after listening to the varying views of senior executives, he decided on a number of major

changes in strategy. He brought together and reorganized, under a new holding company, the

results of the recent undigested mergers. Finding the company far too heavily orientated

towards the British Commonwealth, he entered the European markets head-on. The research

policy of the company was also drastically overhauled. If it was to increase its income very

substantially, Glaxo had to become an international company, and this meant setting out to

supply the individual requirements of every major country in the world. This objective

required the discovery of new efficacious products at a time when the cost of research was

rapidly accelerating. It was therefore decided to have only two research departments instead

of the four then existing: one would be dominated by organic chemists synthesizing complex

molecules for the pharmacologists to evaluate; the second would be headed by biologists, with

chemists playing a supporting role. In time, the new policies resulted in major discoveries by

both research departments.

Although clear in his mind as to the overall strategy to be pursued, Alan Wilson believed

in letting his senior people do their duties in their own way, with some of their time free from

the pressures of day-to-day routine. Sir Paul Girolami, who joined the company as Financial

Controller in 1965, recalls that, when he asked for a job description, Wilson told him that he

should spend one-third of his time on finance, one-third assisting the chairman and one-third

doing nothing.

Finally, Wilson—no doubt haunted by the memory of takeover bids—saw Glaxo

successfully through a bitter fight involving Glaxo, Boots and Beecham. His clearly reasoned

exposition of the likely damage that would be caused by ‘financial engineering’ persuaded the

Monopolies Commission to put a stop to the whole project.

When Wilson retired from the company in 1973, he was able to do so in the knowledge

that Glaxo held a major place in the pharmaceutical industry of every non-communist

country except the USA (that final objective took a further decade to be achieved).

O

Even before joining Glaxo, Wilson had become involved with computers. On 25 July 1962 he

became a director of ICT (International Computers and Tabulators), and during the next ten

years he played a major part in the complex negotiations and struggles accompanying the

development of the British computer industry.

His record of public service was impressive. Wilson’s chairmanship of the Industrial

Research Committee of the Federation of British Industries (1951–58) led to the setting up of

the Industrial Fund for the Advancement of Scientific Education in Schools, which was very

successful in raising money from industry for science laboratories in schools. It was not only

schools that benefited: crossing to New York on the Queen Mary in 1957, Wilson happened to

meet Alan Bullock (later Lord Bullock), who told him of the plans to found a new,

science-orientated, college at Oxford; Wilson’s help in securing the support of industry proved

crucial to the foundation of St Catherine’s. Examples of the many other committees on which




he served, which are indicative of the wide range of his interests, are the Iron and Steel Board,

where he chaired the Technical Advisory Panel (1960–67); the University Grants Committee

(1964–66); the Electricity Council (Deputy Chairman 1966–76); the Board of Governors of

the Bethlem Royal and Maudsley Hospitals (Chairman 1973–80); and the Scientific Advisory

Committee of the National Gallery (1955–70). He was President of the Institute of Physics

and the Physical Society in 1963–64. He also maintained his close connection with the

Goldsmiths’ Company, which had launched him on his research career, becoming Prime

Warden in 1969–70 and serving on many of its committees. His Prime Warden’s commission

commemorated man’s first landing on the Moon. However, there was some concern because

the hand holding the gimbals in which the revolving moon was mounted was made of bronze

and thus could not be hallmarked! Honours received by Wilson include honorary fellowships

of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, St Catherine’s College, Oxford, and UMIST (University of

Manchester Institute of Science and Technology); honorary doctorates from Oxford

University and Edinburgh University; honorary fellowships of the Institution of Chemical

Engineers, the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) and the Institute of

Physics; and the Gold Medal (1984) of the IMA. Wilson’s eightieth birthday was celebrated in

July 1986 at a meeting in Oxford of the Semiconductor Physics Group of the Institute of

Physics, followed by a dinner in St Catherine’s College. Emmanuel College has instituted a Sir

Alan Wilson Research Fellowship, endowed by Glaxo, in his memory.

Alan Wilson had outstanding intellectual gifts. With his exceptionally clear mind he could

reach conclusions so quickly that they often seemed to others to be purely intuitive. He was

usually quiet and reserved in manner, although, when unbuttoned, he could be a remarkably

witty conversationalist. His modesty was such that his great achievements tended to be

underrated. He was a kindly man, and his weakness—if it was one—came from a disdain for

the ruthless political manoeuvres required to deal adequately with the irrational motives,

selfishness and sheer bullying too often encountered in the world of affairs. Beyond science,

mathematics and logic, Alan Wilson was deeply and widely interested in art and literature, an

avid reader and a keen gardener and mountain-walker. He once told me that he was off to go

hiking in the Dolomites, but hoped to stop in Venice long enough to see some Bellinis. He was

also very fond of his Bentley, which he went on driving until both he and his car had reached

a ripe old age.

Sir Alan Wilson died peacefully on 30 September 1995.

A

The Royal Society originally asked Professor B.R. Coles, F.R.S., to write this memoir. He agreed to do so and

invited me to collaborate. We decided that I should deal primarily with Alan Wilson’s prewar work in pure

science and Bryan Coles with his postwar career in industry. Sadly, Bryan Coles died suddenly in February

1997 before he had written his contribution, and the Royal Society thereupon invited me to write the whole

memoir myself. [A memoir of Bryan Coles is included in this volume.]

In addition to the sources cited in the text, I have found Sir Alan Wilson’s own biographical notes for the

Royal Society very helpful in preparing the memoir. Sir Paul Girolami’s obituaries for the Independent (9

October 1995) and for the Goldsmiths’ Company have also been valuable sources. I am very grateful to the

following who have helped with their comments or information, either orally or in writing: the Clerk of the

Goldsmiths’ Company, the Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Professor P.M. Cohn, F.R.S., Sir Paul

Girolami, Professor J. Hamilton, Sir David Jack, F.R.S., Bertha, Lady Jeffreys, Dr Mark Nicholls (Cambridge




University Archives), Professor M.H.L. Pryce, F.R.S., Professor D. Shoenberg, F.R.S., Sir Denys Wilkinson,

F.R.S., and Mr John Wilson. I also thank my wife, Dr Janet Sondheimer, for helpful advice.

The frontispiece photograph was taken in 1969 for the National Portrait Gallery and is reproduced with

permission.

R

Coleman, D.C. 1980 Courtaulds. An economic and social history, vol. 3. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Hamilton, J. & Peng, H.W. 1944 On the production of mesons by light quanta and related processes. Proc. R.

Irish Acad. A 49, 197.

Hebborn, J.E. & Sondheimer, E.H. 1960 The diamagnetism of conduction electrons in metals. J. Phys. Chem.

Solids 13, 105.

Hebborn, J.E., Luttinger, J.M., Sondheimer, E.H. & Stiles, P.J. 1964 The orbital diamagnetic susceptibility of

Bloch electrons. J. Phys. Chem. Solids 25, 741.

Hoddeson, L. et al. 1992 Out of the crystal maze. Oxford University Press.

Lifshitz, I.M., Azbel, M.Ya. & Kaganov, M.I. 1956 On the theory of galvanomagnetic effects in metals. Soviet

Phys. JETP 3, 143.

Lifshitz, I.M., Azbel, M.Ya. & Kaganov, M.I. 1957 On the theory of galvanomagnetic effects in metals. Soviet

Phys. JETP 4, 41.

Mott, N.F. 1936 The electrical conductivity of transition metals. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A 153, 699.

Pippard, A.B. 1989Magnetoresistance in metals. Cambridge University Press.

Sondheimer, E.H. 1950 The theory of the transport phenomena in metals. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A 203, 75.

B

Papers

(1) 1928 A generalised spheroidal wave equation. Proc. R. Soc. Lond.A 118, 617.

(2) The ionised hydrogen molecule. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A 118, 635.

(3) 1929 Perturbation theory in quantum mechanics. Proc. R. Soc. Lond.A 122, 589.

(4) Perturbation theory in quantum mechanics. II. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A 124, 176.

(5) (With R.H. Fowler) A detailed study of the radioactive decay of, and the penetration of

α-particles into, a simplified one-dimensional nucleus. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A 124, 493.

(6) 1931 The theory of electronic semi-conductors. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A 133, 458.

(7) The theory of electronic semi-conductors. II. Proc. R. Soc. Lond.A 134, 277.

(8) 1932 The internal photoelectric effect in crystals. Nature 130, 913.

(9) A note on the theory of rectification. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A 136, 487.

(10) (With R.H. Fowler) The apparent conductivity of oxide coatings used on emitting filaments.

Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A 137, 503.

(11) The theory of metals. I. Proc. R. Soc. Lond.A 138, 594.

(12) 1935 The optical properties of solids. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A 151, 274.

(13) 1937 The second order electrical effects in metals. Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc. 33, 371.

(14) 1938 The electrical properties of the transition metals. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A 167, 580.

(15) Lattice changes associated with the formation of superlattices in alloys. Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc.

34, 81.

(16) The binding energies of the hydrogen isotopes. Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc. 34, 365.

(17) 1940 (With F. Booth) Radiative processes involving fast mesons. Proc. R. Soc. Lond.A 175, 483.

(18) The calculation of processes involving mesons by matrix methods. Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc. 36,

363.




(19) (With F. Booth) The scattering of neutral mesons. Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc. 36, 446.

(20) 1941 The quantum theory of radiation damping. Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc. 37, 301.

(21) 1946 (With W.R. Dean) A note on the theory of dislocations in metals. Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc. 43,

205.

(22) 1947 (With E.H. Sondheimer) The theory of the magneto-resistance effects in metals. Proc. R. Soc.

Lond. A 190, 435.

(23) 1948 A diffusion problem in which the amount of diffusing substance is finite. Phil. Mag. (7) 39, 48.

(24) 1951 (With E.H. Sondheimer) The diamagnetism of free electrons. Proc. R. Soc. Lond.A 210, 173.

(25) 1953 The diamagnetism of quasi-bound conduction electrons. Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc. 49, 292.

(26) Whither man-made fibres? J. Textile Inst. 44, P130.

(27) 1954 The Research Department of Courtaulds Limited. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A 223, 139.

(28) 1958 The organisation and planning of research and development in Courtaulds Limited. In

Business enterprise, by R.S. Edwards and H. Townsend, Appendix VI, p. 317. London:

Macmillan.

(29) 1980 Solid state physics 1925–33: opportunities missed and opportunities seized. Proc. R. Soc. Lond.

A 371, 39.

(30) 1984 Theoretical physics in Cambridge in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In Cambridge physics in the

thirties (ed. J. Hendry), chapter 3.7. Bristol: Adam Hilger Ltd.

Books

(31) 1936 The theory of metals. Cambridge University Press. (Second edition, much enlarged, 1953.

Reprinted 1954, 1958, 1965.)

(32) 1939 Semi-conductors and metals. Cambridge University Press.

(33) 1957 Thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. Cambridge University Press. (Reprinted 1960, 1966.)



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