Peter R. Almond
2013
Leonard George Grimmett was an Englishman who came to Houston in 1949, sight unseen, to start a physics department at a brand new institution. Unfortunately, he died suddenly of a heart attack 28 months after arriving in Houston. I had no intention of writing his biography and was in fact researching the life of another Englishman who had come to Houston 37 years earlier, also sight unseen, to start a physics department in a new institution. His name was Harold Albert Wilson who came to Houston in 1912 as chairman of the physics department at the Rice Institute, the year Rice admitted its first students. Wilson was one of a group of extraordinary young men who had studied physics at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University at the turn of the century under J. J. Thomson.