History
The Rothamsted Experimental Station was founded in 1843 by John Bennet Lawes on his inherited 16th century estate, Rothamsted Manor, to investigate the impact of inorganic and organic fertilizers on crop yield. Lawes, a noted Victorian era entrepreneur and scientist, had founded one of the first artificial fertilizer manufacturing factories one year earlier in 1842.
Appointing a young chemist, Joseph Henry Gilbert, as his scientific collaborator, Lawes launched the first of a series of long-term field experiments, some of which continue to this day. Over the next 57 years, Lawes and Gilbert established the foundations of modern scientific agriculture and the principles of crop nutrition.
In 1902 Daniel Hall moved from Wye College to become director. Hall took a lower salary to join an establishment lacking money, staff, and direction. Hall decided that Rothamsted needed to specialise and that it needed new sources of finance. He was eventually successful in obtaining state support for agricultural research. In 1912 John Russell who had come from Wye in 1907 took over as director and continued in the post until 1943. Russell saw through a major expansion in the 1920s. In 1943 Russell retired and was replaced by Sir William Gammie Ogg. During Ogg's directorship which ended in 1958 the number of staff increased from 140 to 471 and new departments of biochemistry, nematology, and pedology were formed.
Read more about this topic: Rothamsted Research
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)