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The Rutherford Appleton Laboratory is a service organisation funded by the UK government to construct and maintain large scale scientific facilities for use primarily by UK academic scientists.
In 2009 it is in the parish of Chilton, Oxfordshire, on the flat land in the North Wessex area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, just North of the Ridgway National Trail. The area has been in constant agricultural use since Roman times, mainly grazing sheep and training racehorses. Other ancient tracks cross the area, the Icknield way runs to the North, the old Hungerford Road on the West was used by William of Orange on his way to accept the throne of England in 1688. When the Laboratory was first set uparchaeological relics, similar to those thought to be of a Roman and his dog found during construction of a Car Park in about 2004. Water running off the roof of a new building has to be provided with soakaways within the site.
This book covers the period 1957 to 2007. It has a four page introduction followed by 6 chapters, a list of Directors/Chief Executives and a four page (double column) index. The chapters describe the main areas of science in which the Laboratory has worked over the last 50 years: Chasing particles, Neutrons and photons, Atmosphere and Earth, Looking Outwards, Computing at Chilton and An evolving organisation. This last chapter describes all the changes in the name of the laboratory and all the different departments of the UK Government responsible for its funding since 1957. This can be confusing for the reader so the author decided to usually refer to the Laboratory by the name 'Chilton' the site where it was built, regardless of the official name in use at that time. There are no diagrams or photographs, due to a change of management, see 'Notes on this publication' below.
The Beginning, Funding and Management
During World War II the part of the site in the parish of Harwell was an RAF airfield, shortly afterwards it became the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (AERE) concerned with research into both weapons and reactors for peaceful purposes. Tight security was maintained around the site to protect the national weapons development, but it was also important to study the fundamental properties of particles and materials being used in reactor construction. About 1956 it was realised that a Research Laboratory was needed for academic nuclear research outside the wire fence of the AERE. The Chilton site was chosen because, being near to AERE, it could use some of their existing facilities, including medical care, building heating and payment of salaries. Employees were not Civil Servants but had similar grades and salaries and were managed by a different Government agency, the DSIR (see table below) which already managed Research Councils for Agriculture (ARC) and medicine (MRC), a third one was added, SRC, the Science Research Council, with three Boards, Nuclear Physics, Astronomy Space and Radio, Science and Technology, which covered the changing areas of Science on the Chilton site.
Changing Science, what was Chilton used for?
Originally the research was on elementary particles, later it was found neutrons could be used to study the structure of materials and that they were able to show the positions of hydrogen atoms in proteins and viruses for biological research so the Chilton accelerator was modified. Other research was done on muons and neutrinos. Research expanded into other scientific areas: the study and use of large lasers, astronomy and space science. Technology and computing services were needed to construct equipment and analyse data; separate service departments were needed for these.
This book is not intended as an academic
work for historians or physicists, it is mainly about the management and
problems of running such a Laboratory. Personally I find it frustrating
because there are few details of the science or the people doing it.
For example he states that 19 truck loads were needed to deliver the Atlas
computer in 1964, but not what was innovative about it compared with other
computers at that time. Computer input/output is not mentioned, nor the work
of Atlas computing staff in supporting research. On page 50 he describes the
Ariel satellites but does not mention the software written by Atlas staff
for Ariel data collection.
On page 80 he mentions the Nautical Almanac and management problems of
moving it to Chilton, but not the fact that Chilton staff had written
software to output the Nautical Almanac some years before on a high
resolution device, the FR80 microfilm recorder with many uses but apparently
missed by this author. This probably gave rise to the idea that the
computing production work for the Nautical Almanac could be done in Chilton.
In 1981, as more work was done for engineering, the name was changed to SERC (see table below). At the same time the Government decide to try to save funds by moving the Appleton Laboratory, (founded in the 1920s to study radio propagation at Ditton Park, Slough, near Heathrow Airport) to the Chilton Site.
In 2006 it was decided to separate the large facilities funding from that for science in the Universities so the Chilton site, together with large telescopes and international collaborations is funded by the STFC. The international collaborations fund CERN, in Switzerland for nuclear science, ESA, the European Space Agency and others not mentioned in this book, and are paid in the currency of the country where the headquarters of the organisation are sited, thus currency fluctuations affect the amount of UK funds required.
Notes on this publication:
Jack Meadows, the author of this book, is
a member of the Information Science Department at Loughborough University.
Toward the end of 2005 he was commissioned to write a history of the
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory for its 50th anniversary in 2007. The text
was written and the book was in the proof stage when the UK Government
decided on yet another change of management; so the laboratory became the
responsibility of the Science and Technology Facilities Council who decided
their remit was to support the scientific facilities for future research and
declined to fund work on history books, so there are no drawings or
photographs in the book as these were to have been provided by Chilton
before the change in management.
( I am suprised that someone from an Information Science Department did not
have access to word processing software to produce a simple table such as
that I have made as an appendix.)
Administration papers for Government Organisations are supposed to be sent
to the National Archives in Kew, so Laboratory management takes no interest
in history or archives of any sort.
The copyright of the text of this book reverted to the author, who decided
to publish it himself using an 'on-demand' publisher. It can be ordered
either direct from the publisher via their website at www.lulu.com or via
www.Amazon.com. I had trouble finding it at Amazon.co.uk.
The publisher also sells an e-download version which costs much less, but I
did not investigate this.
| Date | Name | UK Government Management |
| 1956 | NIRNS National Institute for Research in Nuclear Science |
AEA Atomic Energy Authority |
| 1957 - 1969 | RHEL Rutherford High Energy Laboratory | DSIR Department of Scientific and Industrial Research |
| 1969 - 1979 | Rutherford Laboratory
name changed to reflect other sciences and amalgamation of the Atlas Centre |
SRC
Science Research Council Boards ARC, MRC, SRC |
| 1979 - 1981 | Rutherford and Appleton Laboratories amalgamation of Appleton Laboratory |
|
| 1981 - 1994 | Rutherford Appleton Laboratory | SERC |
| 1994 - 1995 | Daresbury and Rutherford Appleton Laboratories |
Science and Engineering Research Council |
| 1995 - 2006 | Central Laboratory of the Research Councills. CLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory |
CCLRC Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils |
| 2006 - 2007 | Rutherford Appleton Laboratory | STFC Science and Technology Facilities Council |
This is a 'coffee table' book published as a glossy record of some of the laboratory work and given to scientists invited to a celebratory day in 2007; and to other interested scientists. It is mostly colour photographs although the earlier ones are black and white. The eldest is a photograph of Sir John Cockcroft cutting the first sod in 1957, watched by an admiring crowd of men all wearing suits with white shirts and ties, very different from todays informal jeans and tee shirts. Other photographs are of visiting politicians, Lord Hailsham in 1957 at the Laboratory opening, and Margaret Thatcher in 1972 when Minister of state for Education and Science. Many photographs show scientific equipment under construction or in use; they are mostly taken within the last 15 years, not spread evenly over the 50 years of operation, with the exception of those on pages 124, 125 showing the evolving landscape from the air between 1957 and 2006. You have no idea how much the equipment costs, how many people were involved, how long it took to construct nor how much electricity it uses. For those who worked at the laboratory, there is some amusement in looking for photographs of former colleagues to see how they have aged.
There are six sections, corresponding roughly to the Laboratory Divisions: Particle physics, Technology, Computing, ISIS, Lasers and Space Science with a foreword by Andrew Taylor, head of ISIS. Each section is complete in itself and begins with a useful summary page printed in white text on a grey background, facing a coloured image relevant to the work of the section. Within each section photographs are ordered chronologically. There is little technical detail or results of experiments just a few highly coloured images with a small amount of explanatory text as a figure caption.
Comments on book production:
This book is not intended as an academic work, there is no contents page, no index or bibliography. The authors are anonymous, although an editor can be found on the glossy paper dust cover which carries an ISBN number.
Kate Crennell
August 2009
Some Websites associated with the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in 2009
These are most easily found by starting from
The Science and Technology Facilities Home Page at : www.scitech.ac.uk
and then click on the words Research facilities
which should take you to a page with several links to science at the Chilton site:
Page last updated 22 August 2012