Inscriptions: Laboratories in South Parks Road
The following stone plaque is on the front of the former Dyson Perrins Laboratory (which ceased to be an organic chemistry laboratory in 2003 and is now the Oxford University Centre for the Environment):
BALLIOLENSIS
FECI
HYDATOECVS
O SI MELIVS
[I, Waterhouse, a Balliol man. made this. O if only it were better!]
The Dyson Perrins Laboratory was designed by Paul Waterhouse and opened in 1915. If you extract all the large letters and reorder them from the largest to the smallest, they make the year the building was opened (but are not a proper roman numeral):
M (1000) + D (500) = 1500 + CC (100 twice) = 1700
+ LLLL (50 four times) = 1900 + V V (5 twice) = 1910 + IIIII (1 four times) = 1915
Wikipedia: Paul Waterhouse
Wikipedia: Dyson Perrins Laboratory
Charles William Dyson Perrins, who endowed the laboratory, was heir to the Lea & Perrins Worcester sauce company. In the inscription below, his surname is tangled up with that of William Henry Perkin, who was Waynflete Professor of Chemistry from 1912 to 1929.
Wikipedia: Charles William Dyson Perrins
The two plaques below were erected in South Parks Road by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), the first on the former Dyson Perrins Laboratory, and the second on the Physical Chemistry Laboratory:
Royal Society of Chemistry
National Historical Chemical Landmark
Dyson Perrins Laboratory
University of Oxford
This laboratory was a major centre for Organic Chemistry from 1916–2003
It had only four Heads in that time, the Waynflete Professors
W H Perkin Jnr, Sir Robert Robinson OM, Sir Ewart Jones, and
Sir Jack Baldwin
Sir Robert was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1947 for work done here
on natural products
24 September 2004
National Historic Chemical Landmark
The work of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
at the University of Oxford
In this building from 1956–1972 and at other times elsewhere
in the Oxford Science Area,
Professor Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin,
(1910–1994) OM, FRS, Nobel Laureate, led pioneering work
on the structures of antibiotics, vitamins and proteins, including
penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin, using X-ray diffraction techniques.
Many methods for solving crystal structures were developed taking
advantage of digital computers from the very earliest days.
The work provided a basis for much of present day molecular
structure driven molecular biology and medicinal chemistry.
14 May 2001
Another hexagonal plaque erected by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) can be found on the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory (immediately beneath the plaque to Dorothy Hodgkin):
RSC | Advancing the Chemical Sciences
National Chemical Landmark
Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory
where in 1980, John B. Goodenough with Koichi Mizushima, Philip C. Jones
and Philip J. Wiseman identified the cathode material that enabled
development of the rechargeable lithium-ion battery.
This breakthrough ushered in the age of portable electronic devices.
30 November 2010