Professor W. E. Ayrton, 1847–1908: the ‘Never-resting, Keen-eyed chief'

When I arrived in Japan in 1875, I found a marvellous laboratory, such as the world has not seen elsewhere. At Glasgow, at Cambridge and Berlin, there were three great personalities; the laboratories of [Lord] Kelvin, and of [James Clerk] Maxwell, and of [Hermann von] Helmholtz, however, were not to be mentioned in comparison with [that of] Ayrton. Fine buildings, splendid apparatus, well-chosen, a never-resting-keen-eyed chief of great originality: these are what I found in Japan.