Samuel Curran

Sir Samuel Crowe Curran, FRS, FRSE (23 May 1912 – 15 February 1998) was a Scottish physicist and academic who was the first Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Strathclyde – the first of the new technical universities in Britain. He is the inventor of the scintillation counter, the proportional counter,

To date, Curran remains the longest serving principal and vice chancellor of the University of Strathclyde, holding the post for 16 years, not counting his previous five years as principal of the Royal College of Science and Technology.

Life Samuel Curran was born on 23 May 1912 at Ballymena in Ireland, the son of John Hamilton Curran (from Kinghorn in Fife ), and his wife, Sarah Carson Crowe (some sources state Sarah Owen Crowe ).

The family moved to Scotland soon after for his father to work as foreman of a steelworks near Wishaw. His brother Robert Curran, later a famous pathologist, was born soon after. He had two other brothers, Hamilton and John.

After schooling at Wishaw High School (where he was dux) he completed his first degree in mathematics earning first class honours, and a PhD in physics at the University of Glasgow, before taking a second PhD at the Cavendish Laboratory as a member of St John's College, Cambridge.

At the start of the Second World War Curran and Joan Strothers, who he subsequently married, went to work at the Telecommunications Research Establishment at Worth Matravers on the development of radar. In 1944, he moved to the University of California, Berkeley to participate in the Manhattan Project, developing the atomic bomb. There he invented the scintillation counter by adding a photomultiplier tube to an existing scintillation crystal which had previously been viewed by the human eye to obtain a radiation count.

Following the birth of a handicapped daughter, the Currans set up the Scottish Society for the Parents of Mentally Handicapped Children, now known as Enable Scotland, with Samuel Curran serving as its president from 1964 to 1991.

Samuel Curran died on 15 February 1998 in hospital in Glasgow, aged 85.

Family

He was married to Joan Strothers, a scientist involved with the invention of anti-radar tactics such as Operation Window at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough. They married soon after his posting to Farnborough in 1940, having known her earlier during his Cambridge days.

Major publications

Counting Tubes (1949), S.C. Curran, Academic Press (New York), (with J. D. Craggs) Luminescence and the Scintillation Counter (1953) Alpha, Beta and Gamma Ray Spectroscopy (1964) Energy Resources and the Environment (1976) Energy and Human Needs (1979) (with J. S. Curran) Issues in Science and Education (1988)

Various papers on nuclear researches and education in Procedures of the Royal Society