History
The University was established in 1881 as University College Liverpool, admitting its first students in 1882. In 1884, it became part of the federal Victoria University. In 1894 Oliver Lodge, a professor at the University, made the world's first public radio transmission and two years later took the first surgical X-ray in the United Kingdom. The Liverpool University Press was founded in 1899, making it the third oldest university press in England. Students in this period were awarded external degrees by the University of London.
Following a Royal Charter and Act of Parliament in 1903, it became an independent university with the right to confer its own degrees called the University of Liverpool. The next few years saw major developments at the university, including Sir Charles Sherrington's discovery of the synapse and Professor William Blair-Bell's work on chemotherapy in the treatment of cancer. In the 1930s to 1940s Professors Sir James Chadwick and Sir Joseph Rotblat made major contributions to the development of the atomic bomb. From 1943 – 1966 Allan Downie, Professor of Bacteriology, was involved in the eradication of smallpox.
In 1994 the university was a founding member of the Russell Group, a collaboration of twenty leading research-intensive universities, as well as a founding member of the N8 Group in 2004. In the 21st century physicists, engineers and technicians from the University of Liverpool were involved in the construction of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, working on two of the four detectors in the LHC.
The University has produced eight Nobel Prize winners, from the fields of science, medicine and peace. The Nobel laureates include the physician Sir Ronald Ross, physicist Professor Charles Barkla, the physiologist Sir Charles Sherrington, physicist Sir James Chadwick, chemist Sir Robert Robinson, physiologist Professor Har Gobind Khorana, physiologist Professor Rodney Porter and physicist Professor Joseph Rotblat. Sir Ronald Ross was also the first British Nobel laureate in 1902.
The term "red brick" was first coined by Liverpool professor Edgar Allison Peers (writing as Bruce Truscot) to describe the red brick built civic universities that were built in the UK, mostly in the latter part of the 19th century; these were characterised by Victorian buildings of red brick, such as Victoria Building, which was historically the administrative heart of the University.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)