Summary

On 22^nd November 1948 Mr Meredith Thring, Head of the Physics Department at the newly-formed British Iron and Steel Research Association (BISRA) produces a Physics Note No. 40: ‘Proposals for the establishment of an international research project on luminous radiation’, written in both French and English, and containing a notional commitment from BISRA to help form IFRF.  Thring invites both JE de Graaf of KNHS and Henri Malcor of IRSID to join him for dinner in Kingston near London, and the rest, as they say, is history…

In just four sides of double-spaced typing, Meredith Thring make a highly compelling case for an international co-operative programme of research.  It’s worth a read, just for its elegance of structure and argument, let alone its ground-breaking level of open cooperation and sharing (particularly so in an immediately post-war world).