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Charles Hutton was an English mathematician. He was born in 1737 and died in 1823. He was first a teacher of mathematics at Newcastle, but having published in 1772 a small work on the Principles of Bridges, which attracted attention, he was next year appointed professor of mathematics at Woolwich College. In 1785 he published his Mathematical Tables, followed not long after by his Tracts, Mathematical and Philosophical, and Elements of Conic Sections. His Mathematical and Philosophical Dictionary appeared in 1795-96; his Course of Mathematics in 1798, with an additional volume in 1811. In 1812 he published another collection of Tracts on mathematical and philosophical subjects.
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Sir Frederick Augustus Abel was an English chemist and inventor. He was born in 1827 at London and died in 1902. Having adopted chemistry as a profession, he studied under Hofmann at the Royal College of Chemistry, became professor of Chemistry at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich in 1851 and later chemist to the war Department from 1854 until 1888. He developed explosives and smokeless gun powder, in 1899 with James Dewar he invented cordite.
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General Charles George Gordon (known as Chinese Gordon and Gordon Pasha) was an English military leader. He was born in 1833 at Woolwich and died in 1885 following his capture during the siege of Khartoum. He entered the Royal Engineers in 1852, and served in the Crimea from 1854 to 1856. During the Taeping rebellion in China Charles Gordon succeeded in completely crushing the revolt by means of a specially-trained corps of Chinese, exhibiting marvellous feats of skilful soldiership. On his return to England with the rank of colonel he was appointed chief engineer officer at Gravesend, where his military talents and philanthropy were conspicuously displayed.
From 1874 to 1879 he was governor of the Sudan under the Khedive. For a few months in 1882 he held an appointment at the Cape, and he had just accepted a mission to the Congo from the king of the Belgians, when he was sent to withdraw the garrisons shut up in the Sudan by the insurgent Mahdi. He was shut up in Khartoum by the rebels, and gallantly held that town for a whole year. A British expeditionary force under Lord Wolseley was despatched for his relief; an advance corps of which sighted Khartoum on the 24th of January, 1885, to find that the town had been treacherously betrayed into the hands of the Mahdi two days before, and Charles Gordon killed. Charles Gordon's character was marked by strong religious feelings, which latterly became so intensified as to make him somewhat of a religious enthusiast and fatalist.
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James Jospeh Sylvester was an English mathematician. He was born in 1814 at London and died in 1897. Educated at the Royal Institution school, Liverpool and St John's College, Cambridge he had to wait until 1872 before taking his degree on account of being Jewish. He became professor of natural philosophy at University College, London in 1837 and professor of mathematics at Virginia University, USA in 1841, and afterwards professor of mathematics at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich in 1855. On the foundation of the Johns Hopkins University at Baltimore, USA, he was appointed to the chair of mathematics in 1877. Finally in 1883 he became Savillian professor of geometry at Oxford.
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Sir Kingsley Wood was an English Conservative politician. He was born in 1881 at London and died in 1943. After training as a solicitor he entered parliament as Conservative MP for Woolwich West in 1918, was knighted in 1919 and after holding several junior ministerial posts was Postmaster-General from 1931 to 1935, Minister of Health from 1935 to 1938 and Secretary of State for Air from 1938 to 1940, overseeing Britain's Air Force during the start of the Second World War. From 1940 to 1943 he was Chancellor of the Exchequer and introduced the PAYE (pay-as-you-earn) system of income tax.
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Melita Norwood (Melita Sirnis) was an English NKGB, GRU, MGB and KGB spy. She was born in 1912. Melita Norwood (codename Hola) worked for the Soviet intelligence services during the Second World War, first being recruited in 1937 and afterwards, refusing payment for her services, passing details of Britain's first atomic bomb to her Soviet controllers. Her first job was the Woolwich arsenal, where in 1938 all the other members of her spy ring were arrested, but her identity was not discovered by MI5 and she escaped. She was later identified in 1965 by the British Security Service but was not interviewed so as not to compromise other counter intelligence activities.
After the end of the Cold War in 1992 Vasili Mitrokhin defected to the West and brought with him confirmation of Melisa Norwood being a Soviet spy, but the British Security Services decided they didn't have enough evidence to prosecute her. In 1999 when Mitrokhin's memoirs were published news of Melisa Norwood became public and she was questioned by the police in 1999 during which she confessed fully - she said she would gladly do it again - but no action was taken against the then very elderly Melita Norwood perhaps because the manner of her confession mean that it was not admissible as evidence.
Speaking about why she spied for the Soviets, Melita Norwood said that 'she wanted Russia to be on equal footing'. Decorated with the highest KGB award, the Order of The Red Banner, Melita Norwood was one of the most important spies ever and undoubtedly prevented the American use of nuclear weapons against the USSR or its allies during the Cold War by equipping the USSR with its own nuclear weapons with which it could retaliate.
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Michael Faraday was a British chemist and physicist. He was born in 1791 at Newington Butts and died in 1867. At an early age he was apprenticed to a bookbinder in London, but occupied himself in his leisure hours with electrical and other scientific experiments.
Having been taken by a friend to Sir Humphry Davy's lectures, he attended the course, and conceived such an ardent desire for study that be resolved to quit trade. With this end he sent his notes of the lectures to Sir Humphry Davy, who was so struck with the great ability they showed that he appointed him his assistant at the Royal Institution. In 1829 he became lecturer at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, and in 1833 he was appointed to the newly-established chair of chemistry at the Royal Institution. It was while in this office that he made most of his great electrical discoveries. He discovered electrical currents and invented the dynamo, for example. The farad is named after Michael Faraday.
His communications to the Philosophical Transactions were published separately in three volumes in 1839, 1844 and in 1855. In 1832 he received the honorary degree of D.C.L. from Oxford, was made an honorary member of the Academy at Berlin, with many other honours too numerous to mention. In 1835 he received a pension of 300 pounds a year from Lord Melbourne.
As an experimentalist Michael Faraday was considered the very first of his time. As a popular lecturer he was equally distinguished, and used to draw crowds to the Friday evening lecture at the Royal Institution. Amongst his published works were: Researches in Electricity (1831-1855), Lectures on Non-metallic Elements (1853), Lectures on the Forces of Matter (1860), Lectures on the Chemical History of a Candle (1861).
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Sir Nathaniel Barnaby was an English naval architect. He was born in 1829 at Chatham and died in 1915. Apprenticed as a boy to a shipwright at Sheerness, in 1848 he obtained an Admiralty scholarship. After serving as a draughtsman at the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich and later in the Admiralty he became overseer and in 1870 head of the constructive department of the Admiralty. He was knighted upon his retirement in 1885.
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Olinthus Gilbert Gregory was an English mathematician. He was born in 1774 at Huntingdonshire and died in 1841. At nineteen he published a volume of Lessons, Astronomical and Philosophical, and was afterwards in turn sub-editor of a newspaper at Cambridge, bookseller, and teacher of mathematics. In 1801 he became mathematical master in the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, and published a treatise on astronomy and several mathematical works, of which his Treatise on Mechanics was of most importance. His Letters on the Evidences and Doctrines of the Christian Religion (published in 1810), and a Life of the Reverend Robert Hall (published in 1833), were his chief miscellaneous writings.
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Thomas Drummond was a Scottish soldier and politician. He was born in 1797 at Edinburgh and died in 1840. He was educated at Edinburgh and at Woolwich, and entered the army as an engineer. In 1819 he became assistant to Colonel Colby in the trigonometrical survey of Great Britain and Ireland. He invented a heliostat, and a lime-ball light (the Drummond Light) which he first used about 1825 during the survey of Ireland. He subsequently entered political life, and became in 1835 under-secretary for Ireland, a country which he practically ruled with the utmost success for five years.
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