PORTER, GEORGE

(b. Stainforth, Yorkshire, England, 6 December 1920; d. Canterbury, Kent, England, 31 August 2002), chemistry, scientific administration, public understanding of science.

George Porter was one of the leading English scientists of the post–1945 period. He invented and developed the method of flash photolysis, for which he was awarded jointly the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1967. He was director of the Royal Institution for nearly twenty years (1966–1985) and president of the Royal Society for five (1985–1990). In these roles he emerged as a major spokesperson for science, seeking to promote it to wide publics, and as a stern critic of government cuts in the science budget.

Early Life Porter’s father, John Smith Porter, was a builder and Methodist lay preacher and was also active in local politics. His mother, Alice Ann Porter, née Roebuck, had been a matron in a local poor law institution. They married in 1918 and George was their only child. He attended the local primary school from 1925 until 1931 and later recollected that he had been interested in chemistry since the age of eight. He won a county minor scholarship to Thorne Grammar School where he studied from 1931 until 1938. As a reward for winning the scholarship, his father bought him a chemistry set and an old bus where he could undertake experiments away from the house. Porter would reflect years later that he was “still very fond of explosions.”

After leaving school he studied chemistry at the University of Leeds as an Ackroyd Scholar, developing his interest in physical chemistry, which had been inspired at Leeds by Meredith Evans. With the outbreak of war in 1939, Porter joined the Officer Training Corps and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Fusiliers. At Leeds he became involved with a plan devised in the office of the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Under Maurice Hankey the duchy, responsible for many of the secret, scientifically based weapons programs of those years, wanted to ensure that science graduates learned something useful for the war effort. Thus, in his final year at Leeds, Porter was directed, without being told the reason, to study radiophysics. One suspects here the hand of Charles Snow (better known as C. P. Snow), who worked for Hankey at this time and was specifically concerned with radar development. After graduating in May 1941, Porter continued studying radiophysics at the University of Aberdeen. In August of that year he transferred to the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, being commissioned a sublieutenant radar officer aboard HMS Rochester based in Londonderry. The first part of his war service involved convoy protection. He sometimes went as far south as Freetown on the west coast of Africa and took part in sinking at least three U-boats. He also took part in the Operation Torch landings at Oran and Algiers on the coast of North Africa in late 1942. Promoted to lieutenant in 1944, he was the officer in charge of the Royal Navy’s radar school in Belfast. The following year he was appointed to Joint Command Operations in Whitehall for the projected invasion of Japan, but as he commented, “I was too late!” (RI MS GP A1-7).

Serving at sea, even in wartime, gives sailors large amounts of time to think, and this is what Porter did. He later recollected:

I read a lot outside science—classics, poetry, philosophy and religion—which I more or less left, although my father was a lay preacher. Lying in my hammock, I convinced myself that science was the true philosophy and that the search for knowledge is the highest aim of mankind. (RI MS GP A1-7)

The Navy was a turning point in the sense that I had time to think deeply and when I came out I was absolutely clear what I wanted to do: research in the natural sciences, and that is all I would ever want to do. (Porter, Chemistry in Britain, 1975, p. 398)

Cambridge Years Thus, following demobilization, he went in 1945 to Emmanuel College at the University of Cambridge where he became a research student with the photochemist Ronald Norrish in the Physical Chemistry Laboratory. In the 1940s Norrish was quite notorious for his drinking, and Fred Dainton, who had worked with him, commented that Norrish was “bad tempered and autocratic [in his] treatment of juniors” and Porter would experience problems with him. At Norrish’s direction, Porter was put to work to find out more about the CH ₂ radical. Until this time Norrish had undertaken his photochemical work using a continuous beam of light produced by an army searchlight, which could not be used to study reactions lasting even a millisecond; he and Porter were aware that much of interest must happen within that space of time—the problem was to make it somehow accessible to experimental investigation.

Porter’s breakthrough came in 1947, when he visited the electrical engineering company Siemens in Preston, Lancashire, to collect a new bulb for the searchlight. There he saw the flash lamps made by Siemens and, in his own words, “immediately all the pulse techniques of radio clicked into place, and it was obvious that this was the way to tackle the problem” (Porter, Chemistry in Britain, 1975, p. 398). All the knowledge of radar that he had accumulated in the military context of his naval service could now be put to use in tackling the problem of how to study short-lived, transient chemical phenomena. Porter realized that the way to identify short-lived intermediates in such reactions was to use highly intense short pulses of light to excite a reaction, rather than the weaker continuous beam, as Norrish and he had done hitherto. The intermediates thus created could be detected by either a second continuous weak beam of light or a second pulse of light delayed in time with respect to the exciting flash. The latter method was the first “pump-and-probe” technique—a technique also transferred from radar. It should also be added that as a radar officer, Porter had additionally acquired considerable practical knowledge of electronics, which put him in good stead in overcoming the “rather severe experimental difficulties” of flash photolysis, as it was called (RI MS GP A1-7).

This method was to prove immensely fruitful in understanding short-lived transient molecules and molecular fragments. For instance his early studies of the free radical chlorine oxide (ClO) later became important in understanding the cause of the ozone hole. After completing his PhD in 1949 (the same year that he married Stella Brooke), he was appointed demonstrator in physical chemistry at Cambridge and began building up his first research group to explore the scientific terrain that his 1947 insight had opened up. By 1950 the members were studying reactions approaching a microsecond.

In 1952 Porter was appointed assistant director of research in physical chemistry and at the same time elected a Fellow of Emmanuel College. Two years later, for reasons that seem have coincided with a period of particular tension with Norrish, Porter left Cambridge and was appointed deputy director of the British Rayon Research Association in Manchester, which he later admitted may have been a mistake. Research associations had been established in the interwar period in an attempt to bring together academic science and industry. At the Rayon Research Association, Porter applied his science to understanding the essentially photochemical problems surrounding the fading of fabric dyes. But, as he fully appreciated, his employers needed practical results. Therefore, this was not a suitable environment for him to pursue his own research interests, and he left in 1955 to become the first professor of physical chemistry at the University of Sheffield.

Research at Sheffield At Sheffield, Porter and his colleagues took advantage of the expansion of the English university system to build up the department of which he became head in 1963, the same year he was appointed Firth Professor. Porter developed a large research group that, in addition to working purely on photochemistry, diversified into biochemistry, biology, and so on to illustrate how useful the photochemical techniques developed by them could be. Thus far, he and his group had not been able to study reactions lasting less than a microsecond. The invention of the laser in 1960 potentially gave Porter and his group the opportunity to get down to these much shorter time intervals. It was not a straightforward matter, however, as most lasers were then made in America and had to be sent from there, but gradually at Sheffield, laser flashes became of shorter and shorter duration and this work reached its climax after Porter and his group had moved to the Royal Institution in 1966, when they reached the nanosecond and then the picosecond level.

It was at Sheffield that Porter became interested in what for want of a better term can be called science communication to a broad audience. He later recollected that this stemmed from his inaugural lecture at Sheffield, when the university’s vice-chancellor advised that it be filled with experimental demonstrations. An interest in making science accessible to the public at large manifested itself in his 1962 book, Chemistry for the Modern World, and a television program on his flash photolysis work. The latter in turn led to a television series in 1965–1966 titled The Laws of Disorder, in which he was able to present thermodynamics in an interesting way. With his reputation for scientific research and his interest in popularizing science, it is little wonder that he became interested in the long established work of the Royal Institution in both these areas and vice versa.

The Royal Institution Porter’s work at the Royal Institution to which he moved in 1966 as its director cannot be understood without an appreciation of the history of the Royal Institution during the previous fifteen years. In 1950 Edward Andrade was appointed Fullerian Professor of Chemistry and director of the Davy-Faraday Research Laboratory in the Royal Institution, the two key staff positions in Royal Institution. Andrade, not the most diplomatic of people, came with a strong reforming agenda that was opposed by the more conservative groups in the Royal Institution, which were led by the secretary, Alexander Rankine. During 1950 and 1951, Andrade and Rankine fought each other with every means available for control of the institution. In mid-1952, the members of the Royal Institution passed a vote of no confidence in Andrade, who resigned, but only after it was agreed that the terms of his settlement would go to independent arbitration, which eventually awarded him the substantial sum of seven thousand pounds.

In addition to the internal problems created by these developments, further difficulties were caused by Andrade’s receiving support from a powerful group, mostly chemists, within the Royal Society, including Cyril Hinshelwood, who would become president of the society in 1955. Whatever the reasons for such support, it would put Andrade’s eventual successor in a very difficult position indeed. In the end, after much agonizing, Lawrence Bragg, director of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University, accepted the position that his father had held in the interwar years. Bragg took over at the beginning of 1954 and in effect put himself and the Royal Institution in scientific purdah, at least for a few years.

Despite this, Bragg managed to turn the Royal Institution around from what had been the nadir of its fortunes. He reinvigorated the Davy-Faraday Research Laboratory, where scientists such as Max Perutz, John Kendrew, and David, later Lord, Phillips carried out much of their work on determining the structures of hemoglobin, myoglobin, and lysozyme in the 1950s and 1960s. Bragg also turned the public program around most effectively in founding the Schools’ Programme.

It was in this context that Porter seems first to have become acquainted with the Royal Institution. In 1960 Bragg invited him to deliver the Salters’ lectures for sixth formers on the subject of chemical reactions, which he did that year and the following one. Then, in 1963, Porter was appointed part-time professor of chemistry at the institution on Bragg’s recommendation. Although Bragg, with his patience, tact, and diplomatic skills, had achieved a considerable degree of administrative reform since 1954, Porter’s appointment to this position illustrates just how much more needed to be done. After the initial proposal, the managing committee at the institution agreed to determine whether such a position as professor of chemistry was vacant and, if not, to arrange for one to be declared vacant. At their next meeting a month later, the managers were informed that the professorship of chemistry had been vacated just under a century earlier by Edward Frankland. Porter was immediately appointed. One cannot but think that the title of Porter’s 1965 Friday evening discourse, “The Chemical Bond since Frankland,” was a slight dig at this process.

Toward the end of 1964, the officers (that is the president, secretary and treasurer) of the Royal Institution were giving thought as to who should succeed Bragg, who would become seventy the following year. Although there were other possibilities, it is clear that from a very early stage that Bragg had been grooming Porter as his successor. According to Porter, Bragg had told him about all the difficulties that had occurred at the Royal Institution. A key issue was Porter’s title there in addition to that of Fullerian Professor and director of the Davy-Faraday Research Laboratory. He insisted that he also be called director of the Royal Institution, and to this the managing group somewhat reluctantly agreed. The sensitivity of such issues can be gauged from the Royal Institution’s press release announcing Porter’s appointment, in which it was stated that since the time of Thomas Young and Humphry Davy, the resident professors had directed the work of the Royal Institution. By referring to people more than a century and a half previously, the Royal Institution sought to place its difficulties in the long dead past.

At the Royal Institution, Porter reestablished his research group, which changed for the first time in over forty years the research direction of the Davy-Faraday Research Laboratory. There, Porter and his groups in 1967 (the year he won the Nobel Prize) were finally able to study reactions lasting for a nanosecond, and by 1975 they had reached the picosecond level. This level of investigation opened the way for the study of photosynthesis and for potentially replicating that natural process. Despite considerable effort in that direction, Porter was never quite able to get there. Throughout his time at the Royal Institution, Porter expanded the number of his research groups, especially with the appointment of David Phillips (no relation to Lord Phillips) from the University of Southampton in 1980 to be Wolfson Professor of Natural Philosophy and, in effect, Porter’s deputy.

So far as running the Royal Institution was concerned, Porter addressed some of the issues relating to the basic infrastructure of the building, which had been neglected due to a want of resources following the Andrade affair. As early as June 1965 he envisaged the construction of a modern purpose-built laboratory next to the Royal Institution to allow further expansion of research. To secure the substantial funding needed, Porter in his early years oversaw a fund-raising campaign built around the centenary of the death of Michael Faraday. This campaign did not generate sufficient resources for the major new laboratory, but it did produce enough to permit the refurbishment of some existing laboratories. In addition, he also raised funds to construct a small lecture theater as well as the Faraday Museum (opened by the queen in 1973) and Archives Room.

Porter, acutely aware of the heritage of the Royal Institution and its contemporary resonances, not least the possession of a remarkable collection of iconic scientific apparatus and an archive, took a strong interest in the history of science. With Bragg he edited the ten volumes of the physical sciences section of Library of Science, which reprinted papers from the Proceedings of the Royal Institution, founded in 1851. With Jim Friday, he edited Advice to Lecturers, an anthology of writings by Faraday and Bragg about lecturing—a little volume that remains ever popular. Frank Greenway was appointed part-time reader in the history of science, while the award to the institution of a substantial Leverhulme Foundation grant allowed detailed study of the history of the Royal Institution during in the nineteenth century. This resulted in Sophie Forgan’s thesis, Morris Berman’s thesis and book (which had a mixed reception), the publication of the managers’ nineteenth-century minutes, the establishment of a number of discussion series, and ultimately in the early 1980s the Royal Institution Centre for the History of Science and Technology. Such historical work had contemporary significance in that Porter was able to use it to bury the causes of problems that had taken on such vituperative form in the early 1950s, for example by referring entirely ahistorically to Faraday being director of the Royal Institution, Porter removed the problems surrounding his own use of that title. Furthermore, he used alleged reforms in the past, for instance, for instance Davy’s supposed abolition of the proprietors in 1810, as justification for continuing Bragg’s program of reforming and modernizing the Royal Institution’s administration. In this Porter was assisted by H. J. V. Tyrrell who had been a colleague of his at Sheffield and had come to London in 1964 to be professor of chemistry at Chelsea College. He was secretary of the Royal Institution from 1978 to 1984, in which capacity he oversaw with Porter the merging of the managers and visitors (a sort of audit committee that had existed since the early nineteenth century) of the Royal Institution to form the council in 1984. Porter also abolished a large number of the smaller committees that in his view had outlived their usefulness. By the 1980s, therefore, the structures of the Royal Institution had been deliberately reformed in such a way as to make the recurrence of anything like the Andrade affair impossible.

Although Porter regarded the Royal Institution primarily as a research institute, under his direction the Schools’ Lectures program was expanded, and in science communication, Porter was responsible for establishing the annual televising of the Royal Institution’s Christmas Lectures (of which he gave two highly successful series himself). He was also the driving force behind the BBC’s Young Scientists of the Year, in which school science projects were judged by panels of eminent scientists.

The Royal Society In 1985 Porter was elected president of the Royal Society, which illustrates that the problems that had existed between the Royal Institution and Royal Society following the Andrade affair were no longer relevant. Because of his election he decided to retire, with a brief overlap, from the directorship of the Royal Institution—although, interestingly, neither William Bragg nor Henry Dale had, earlier in the twentieth century, felt the same need. Most of Porter’s research groups moved to the Centre for Photomolecular Sciences, newly created for him at Imperial College. By this time, the femtosecond timescale had become accessible.

At the Royal Society, Porter’s main task was to act as a spokesman for science at a time when the science budget was being drastically cut by the Conservative government led by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. He used his position as president to criticize sharply government science policy and delivered his most trenchant comments on the occasion of his final presidential address in 1990:

It is difficult for ministers, some with little or no secondary education in science, to appreciate the anger and frustration that scientists have long felt at a system which is controlled and guided by those who have little understanding of what makes scientists tick or appreciation of what science has done and will do for mankind.

Porter, however, welcomed the decision by the government in 1988 to include science in the National Curriculum.

Another strategy that Porter developed in the 1980s to cope with the perceived crisis of confidence in science was to initiate a major program to promote the public understanding of science. In 1985, the Royal Society issued a report titled The Public Understanding of Science. Porter, who was then simultaneously and uniquely director of the Royal Institution, president of the Royal Society, and president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, used the opportunity to establish a joint Committee on the Public Understanding of Science (COPUS), representing the three organizations. He chaired COPUS himself for the first four years, thus giving it a high initial profile that it otherwise might not have enjoyed.

Following the end of his term of office at the Royal Society in 1990, Porter continued performing his research at Imperial College and promoting science. He did the latter particularly through his position in the House of Lords after he had been created a life peer as Baron Porter of Luddenham, in 1990, having been appointed to the Order of Merit the previous year and knighted in 1972. In the House of Lords he continued his criticisms of government science policy, particularly in the levels of funding accorded to the Research Councils. He was also scornful of their tendency to support “positively managed coherent programmes of research,” as Aaron Klug recollected him ironically phrasing it in his address at Porter’s memorial service at St Margaret's, Westminster (typescript copy in author’s papers).

Porter can be viewed, in some sense, as a representative transitional figure in the development of science in the second half of the twentieth century. Moving from a time when a single individual could still make a fundamental experimental discovery to an era of large research groups, Porter was clearly adept at handling various approaches to scientific inquiry. Furthermore, for all the problems it created, Porter realized that science needed to be part of general culture (as it had been in the nineteenth century) rather than something separated from society at-large. For Porter, science as research and science as culture probably went together very closely. We have in Porter, as in his hero Faraday, a top scientist who was fully committed to communicating his science and that of others to a wide audience.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The largest collection of Porter’s papers is in the Royal Institution in London, while there are also significant collections in the Royal Society and at Imperial College, both in London. There is a selected bibliography in Fleming and Phillips cited below.

WORKS BY PORTER

Chemistry for the Modern World. London: George G. Harrap and Co., 1962.

“Quick as a Flash: An Interview with Sir George Porter.” Chemistry in Britain 11 (1975): 398–401.

Chemistry in Microtime: Selected Writings on Flash Photolysis, Free Radicals, and the Excited State. London: Imperial College Press, 1997. Contains reprints of Porter’s major papers.

OTHER SOURCES

Fleming, Graham R., and David Phillips. “George Porter KT OM, Lord Porter of Luddenham 6 December 1920–31 August 2002.” Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 50 (2004): 257–283. Very good on Porter’s science.

James, Frank A. J. L., and David Phillips. “Obituaries: George Porter.” Physics Today 53, no. 3 (2003): 94–96.

Phillips, David, and James Barber, eds. The Life and Scientific Legacy of George Porter. London: Imperial College Press, 2006. Contains essays and reprinted papers by colleagues and students of Porter, illustrating their personal and scientific relationships with him.

Frank A. J. L. James