Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core MicroscopyPioneers Pioneers in Optics: George Gabriel Stokes and William Hyde Wollaston Michael W. Davidson . IP address: National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306
[email protected] 170.106.33.42 George Gabriel Stokes perhaps his most important optical research. The following is an (1819–1903) excerpt of his influential findings, which were read to the Royal , on Born in Ireland on August 13, 1819, George Stokes was Society of London on May 27, 1852: 29 Sep 2021 at 13:50:11 the youngest of six children. His father, a rector, directed his The following researches originated in a consideration of the early education before very remarkable phenomenon discovered by Sir John Herschel sending him to a school in in a solution of sulphate of quinine, and described by him Dublin. Stokes attended in two papers printed in the Philosophical Transactions for Bristol College in England, 1845, entitled “On a Case of the Superficial Colour presented , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at followed by Pembroke Col- by a Homogeneous Liquid internally colourless,” and “On lege at Cambridge Uni- the Epipolic Dispersion of Light.” The solution of quinine, versity, where he studied though it appears to be perfectly transparent and colourless, mathematics. He graduated like water, when viewed by transmitted light, exhibits in 1841 and was bestowed nevertheless in certain aspects, and under certain incidences with many honors, in- of the light, a beautiful celestial blue color. It appears from the cluding a fellowship that experiments of Sir John Herschel that the blue colour comes enabled him to remain at only from a stratum of fluid of small but finite thickness Cambridge.