Henry Edgar Hall

1 portrait of Henry Edgar Hall

© Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge

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Henry Edgar Hall

by Antony Barrington Brown
2 1/4 inch square film negative, 28 March 1958
Given by Antony Barrington Brown, 2010
Photographs Collection
NPG x104700

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Events of 1958back to top

Current affairs

Britain's first motorway is built. The Preston bypass (M6) was the first road to be built to official motorway standards, although the M1 (opened in 1959) was the first road to be given official status. The road was opened by the Prime minister, Harold Macmillan, and heralded a new age of mass, high-speed motoring.

Art and science

Michael Bond publishes A Bear Called Paddington, the first Paddington Bear book. This popular character is remembered for being found at Paddington Station by the Brown family, for wearing a floppy hat, duffle coat and Wellington boots, and for his penchant for marmalade sandwiches.
The children's television programme, Blue Peter, is broadcast for the first time.

International

Following the USSR's successful launch of the Sputnik 1 satellite in 1957, America launches its own space agency, NASA. Under pressure from the Soviets' early lead, NASA began research into human spaceflight. The competition between the two superpowers to explore outer space, send humans beyond the Earth's orbit and land on the moon was known as the 'space race'.

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Prof Robin Marshall

12 July 2017, 14:17

The sitter Henry Edgar Hall, b 1928, d 4 Dec 2015, was a prominent British physicist specialising in low temperatures. He got his PhD in 1957 whilst at Emmanuel College Cambridge, therefore this photograph, if taken in 1953, would have been at the start of his postgraduate research. The photographer, Antony Barrington Brown, (BB) was at Gonville and Caius around the same time and was the picture editor for the student newspaper Varsity. Interestingly, Henry Hall's left hand rests on a piece of metal-work known as "Dexion frame", which was much used in physics laboratories. BB worked at Dexion during the 1950s and is reputed to have designed this frame, a kind of full strength Meccano. Henry Hall was appointed as lecturer at Manchester University in 1958 and promoted to full professor in 1961.