Vernon Harrison

Vernon George Wentworth Harrison (14 March 1912 – 14 October 2001) was a president of the Royal Photographic Society, and a professional "research worker of disputed documents".

Biography

Harrison was born in Sutton Coldfield, Warwickshire, England in March 1912, to a schoolteacher father. Harrison was educated at Bishop Vesey's Grammar School, before reading Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics at the University of Birmingham. Subsequently, he undertook three years of postgraduate research in the Physics Department, studying in particular "the use of photography and photomicrography as recording media."

Obtaining his PhD, Harison was briefly employed in the London laboratories of the Printing & Allied Trades Research Association (PATRA) as a research physicist, shortly before war broke out, and he took on a role at the Ministry of Supply. PATRA's records and equipment was destroyed in air raids on London, and new labs south of London in Leatherfield only opened in 1947, at which point Harrison began work "on the optical properties of paper, color printing, and the quality of halftone reproduction". He goes on to all-but-rule-out the object (allegedly "Nessie") as being a branch, but concludes however that "t is not possible to say from a single still transparency exactly what the photograph represents."

Other interests A lifelong photography enthusiast, he was, between 1974 and 1976, President of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, and among his other interests counts the music of Franz Liszt. He is the surviving co-founder, and a past chairman, of the (English) Liszt Society.

Harrison describes himself as "reading the equations of Schrodinger and Dirac through the eyes of Francis Thompson."

Partial bibliography Theory of the Half-tone Screen (The Photographic Journal) The signatures on the walls of Queens house in Linton Cambs (SPR proceedings, Oct 1994) HP Blavatsky and the SPR (1997) "Harry Price and the Rudi Schneider Phenomena" in Psychical Studies – the Journal of the Unitarian Society for Psychical Studies, No. 38, Winter 1987