City St Georges, University of London (formerly City University and before that the Northampton Institute) dates to its foundation in 1894, and remains on the site bequeathed by the Marquess of Northampton and the Earl of Compton, with generous City-based benefactors supporting its foundation, including The Worshipful Company of Skinners and The Worshipful Company of Saddlers.  This emphasizes its links to ancient City Livery Companies that remain to this day, such as to the Worshipful Company of Spectacle Makers and to a more recent one, the Worshipful Company of Scientific Instrument Makers.

The Institution was founded with a clear mission of promoting 'the industrial skill, general knowledge, health and wellbeing of young men and women belonging to the poorer classes' – particularly important for what was then a very poor area of London.   Today that mission is fulfilled in taking many undergraduate students into science and engineering who are the ‘first in the family’ to benefit from a University education.  Interestingly, the Institution was innovative at its foundation in establishing departments with a strongly practical bias, including Mechanical Engineering & Metallurgy and unusually in the 19^th century a Department combining Applied (Technical) Physics and Electrical Engineering.  Since the beginning of the 18^th century, Clerkenwell was the centre of clock- and watch-making and The Horology Institute was based in Northampton Square opposite the University, which then offered evening classes in horology.  The Applied (Technical) Physics and Electrical Engineering Department laid the foundation for two early academic innovations – in 1903 the Technical Optics Department was founded and in the 1920s the Department of Optometry and Visual Sciences established as a separate department.  With its founding the Northampton Institute became one of the first establishments in the world to educate optometrists to degree level.  It established close links to the world-famous Moorfields Eye Hospital, which are strong to this day.

Critical to this innovative outlook and its success was the inspiration of Charles Vickery Drysdale CB OBE FRSE (1874–1961).  He was the founding Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics at the Northampton Institute when the first students were admitted in 1896.  However, he was active in the profession, as President of the (then independent) Optical Society in 1904, but from 1898 he was a member of the Physical Society and as a co-founder, oversaw its transition into the Institute of Physics, serving as the Vice-President of the new Institute from 1932–1936.  He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1921 and from 1934 to 1936 he was a joint manager of the Royal Institution. His work was recognized becoming the Institute of Physics Duddell Medallist for 1936.  Drysdale was also interested in eugenics and in social reform and is remembered for opening the second birth control clinic in Britain in 1921 and co-founding the Family Planning Association in 1930.

Drysdale understood the need for technical innovation to support the First World War effort during the conflict from 1914 to 1918 and turned the optics laboratories of the Department that he led to the manufacture of optical components that could no longer be sourced from continental Europe, especially Germany.  These were needed for telescopes and gun sights for the trenches and his Department had the equipment and skilled labour to make them for the military.  Further, the engineering faculties of the Northampton Institute were used to produce telegraph sets and members of academic staff helped to train workers and service personnel.  At the war’s end, all departments also participated in schemes to retrain and find employment for wounded ex-servicemen.  At City, one of its staff members F D Edwards pioneered the manufacture of vacuum pumps, ‘spinning off’ the Edwards Vacuum Company in 1919 – a company that today has a multibillion-dollar turnover worldwide and is a recognized leader in the field internationally.

However, the later establishment of a Department of Horology and the training of staff to work in the then world-famous watchmaking and repair activity in the Clerkenwell area (where the University is based) emphasized training in skills applied to a field where the UK was famous and laid the foundation for research and teaching in the field of instrumentation.  The great UK watchmaker George Daniels (whose hand-made pieces have sold recently at auction for millions of dollars) trained after the second world war at the Northampton Institute and was the inventor of the co-axial escapement and became one of the greatest horologists of his time.  The co-axial escapement was one of the most significant advancements in clock-making in the last 250 years. It is currently licensed to Omega, who adopted the design in the manufacturing of their premium line.  George Daniels’ appreciation for City carries through to this day with a generous financial endowment which funds the annual George Daniels Lecture, a Professorship and Lectureship in Scientific Instrumentation and scholarships in that field of study – funding from his will supports the same sort of underprivileged students today in engineering and science that he was before he completed his education there.     

However, key to Dysdale’s legacy is his forward thinking in both the areas of applied optics and instrumentation and ophthalmic optics that continue today across what are the Schools of Science & Technology and Health Sciences.  The University formed a Measurement and Instrumentation Research Centre under the leadership of Professor Ludwik Finkelstein OBE FREng in 1970 to tackle new problems with industry, such as the design of better instruments using the then innovative techniques of computer modelling of materials and designs from which the instruments were made.  The close links between applied physics and engineering led to Finkelstein creating a School of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics, bringing these two separate departments together again in 1988.       

Staff continue to bridge a gap that is increasingly seen as artificial and make important contributions to the field and publish extensively.  In engineering optics and instrumentation, work is currently led by Professors Tong Sun OBE FREng and Kenneth Grattan OBE FREng (who were the 2023 Blodgett Gold Medallists of the Institute of Physics).  The former Department of Optometry had been pioneering not in the training of optometrists to degree level (something we now completely take for granted) but in prize-winning research work in visual science, led by Professors John Barbur and Chris Hull.  Interesting all the above have physics degrees, illustrating in their versatility the value of an education in essential physics.

Much has moved on and the recently renamed City St Georges University of London has expanded from the technical institution that it was in Drysdale’s day to become a more comprehensive University well known also for is Bayes Business School and, from 2024, the incorporation of St Georges Medical School.  The talk will emphasize the continuity of the contribution begun by Drysdale over 125 years ago in these fields and how research today is solving key problems for industry where optical techniques form ideal solutions to key industrial measurement problems.