Erasmus Smith's Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy

Erasmus Smith's Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin is a chair in physics founded in 1724 and funded by the Erasmus Smith Trust, which was established by Erasmus Smith, a wealthy London merchant, who lived from 1611 to 1691. It is one of the oldest dedicated chairs of physics in Britain and Ireland. Originally, the holder was to be elected from the members of the college by an examination to determine the person best qualified for the professorship. Since 1851, the professorship has been supported by Trinity College. Of the 22 holders of this chair, seven were Fellows of the Royal Society while one, Ernest Walton, won the Nobel Prize for Physics. The inaugural Erasmus Smith's Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy was Richard Helsham (1724), who was also the Donegal Lecturer in Mathematics (1723–30) as well as the Regius Professor of Physic (1733–38) at Trinity College. He is best known for his book, A Course of Lectures in Natural Philosophy, which was published posthumously in 1739. This publication is considered to be one of the earliest undergraduate textbooks on Newtonian Physics and was required reading for undergraduates as late as 1849. From 1724 to 1847 the chair had a mostly, but not exclusively, mathematical and theoretical orientation, with many holders being also mathematicians, and several such as Bartholomew Lloyd (1822) and James MacCullagh (1843) having previously held the Erasmus Smith's Professor of Mathematics chair. However, this period also saw the appointment of Humphrey Lloyd (1831), who succeeded his father Bartholomew Lloyd, and is considered one of Trinity's greatest experimental physicists. The younger Lloyd is known for experimentally verifying conical refraction, a theoretical prediction made by William Rowan Hamilton about the way light is bent when traveling through a biaxial crystal. He also performed important research on terrestrial magnetism, visiting Gauss and Alexander von Humboldt in Germany, as well as building a “magnetical observatory” in Trinity College Dublin. In 1847 the University Chair of Natural Philosophy (1847) was founded and took on the applied mathematics and theoretical physics role, while Erasmus Smith's Professorship became predominantly a chair of experimental physics. Since then, the chair has been occupied by a number of noted experimental physicists.