Roget in Science and Technology
Roget was much concerned with medical education but the School of Medicine at the University of Manchester was only established in 1874. He was also one of the founders of the Medical and Chirurgical Society of London, which later became the Royal Society of Medicine, and he was a secretary of the Royal Society. In 1815, he invented the log-log slide rule, allowing a person to perform exponential and root calculations simply. This was especially helpful for calculations involving fractional powers and roots. In 1834 he became the first Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution. He was examiner in physiology in the University of London.
On 9 December 1824, Roget presented a paper entitled Explanation of an optical deception in the appearance of the spokes of a wheel when seen through vertical apertures. This article is often incorrectly referenced as either On the Persistence of Vision with Regard to Human Motion or Persistence of Vision with regard to Moving Objects, likely due to erroneous citations by film historians Terry Ramsaye and Arthur Knight (see Anderson and Anderson below).
While Roget's explanation of the illusion was probably wrong, his consideration of the illusion of motion was an important point in the history of film, and probably influenced the development of the Thaumatrope, the Phenakistiscope and the Zoetrope.
He wrote numerous papers on physiology and health, among them the fifth Bridgewater Treatise, Animal and Vegetable Physiology considered with reference to Natural Theology (1834), a two-volume work on phrenology (1838), and articles for several editions of Encyclopædia Britannica.
He played an important role in the establishment of the University of London; he was a founder of the Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge and wrote for it a series of popular manuals. He showed remarkable ingenuity in inventing and solving chess problems and designed an inexpensive pocket chessboard.
He was a contributor to Rees's Cyclopaedia articles on: Sweating sickness, symptom, synocha, synochus, tabes, tetanus
Read more about this topic: Peter Mark Roget
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