The Contemporary Scientific Archives Centre

Abstract

Abstract In the early 1960s several people began to worry about the records of contemporary scientists and engineers; ‘contemporary’ for this purpose is defined as those who died after 1945. It was clear that this generation of scientists and engineers had changed history in all kinds of ways and yet no systematic efforts were being made to preserve their papers. The papers even of minor politicians poets and novelists were by contrast eagerly sought. I remember that my own concern dated from a visit to James Chadwick who, besides being a great scientist, had played a crucial diplomatic and administrative role in the wartime and postwar atomic project. He had retired to North Wales and showed me his attic lined with filing cabinets but when I asked what he was going to do with them, he gloomily replied ‘burn them’. (They were subsequently preserved).

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