Exhibit 11 - Quadrant electrometer and miner's lamp
Robert Clifton was appointed to the chair of Experimental Philosophy in 1865. He retired in 1915 but in those 50 years virtually no research was done in the Clarendon Laboratory. Legend has it that Clifton thought the wish to do research "displayed a certain restlessness of mind". However he was not entirely inactive. He had sufficient funds to purchase instruments in the fields of electrostatics, current electricity, magnetism and optics. Some of these instruments have survived and are now in the Archive.
Clifton was conscientious in carrying out his teaching duties but he would not allow his students to use his prized instruments and some of these, dating from between 1872 and 1900, appear to be unused and in their original containers!
He was active in improving the design of some devices among them a quadrant electrometer and a miner's lamp pictured above and a precise prism spectrometer which is listed in the 1895 Elliot Bros. catalogue.