Sir George Porter(1920–2002)

George Porter was born at Stainforth, a colliery village near Doncaster, on 6 December 1920, the elder son of a railway clerk. He won a scholarship to the University of Leeds in 1938 and took a first in chemistry in 1941. Commissioned into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in 1942, he spent four years as a radar officer, ending the war with the British Pacific Fleet, and it was the radar work that taught him the microsecond-scale electronic measurement on which his Nobel Prize would later rest.

He went up to Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1945 to work under Ronald Norrish on the kinetics of very fast chemical reactions, a problem the laboratory tools of the day could not reach. Between 1947 and 1950 Porter brought his radar background to the bench and worked out flash photolysis: a short bright flash to start the reaction at a known instant, then a second probing flash microseconds later to photograph its intermediates one slice at a time. It made the intermediate states of photochemical reactions visible for the first time.

He took the chair of physical chemistry at Sheffield in 1955, the youngest holder of such a chair in Britain for half a century, and extended the technique into the nanosecond and picosecond range. In 1967 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Norrish and Manfred Eigen for the methods that made it possible to follow chemical reactions on the microsecond and shorter timescale. He was the youngest British chemist to win the Nobel since William Ramsay.

In 1966 he became Director of the Royal Institution, the institutional home of British chemistry since Davy and Faraday, and ran it for nineteen years, modernising its laboratories and continuing the Christmas Lectures Faraday had begun in 1825. He gave the lectures himself three times; his 1969 series, The Laws of Disorder, became the most-watched chemistry lectures in British broadcasting history. He used the platform throughout to argue that a country's basic-science laboratory builds its long-term economic foundations.

He was knighted in 1972, awarded the Order of Merit in 1989, and raised to the peerage as Baron Porter of Luddenham in 1990. As President of the Royal Society from 1985 to 1990 he commissioned and signed off the Society's foundational Climate Change report. He returned to research at Imperial College and worked into his eighties on the photochemistry of photosynthesis, the problem he believed the next generation's energy economy would have to solve. He died at Canterbury on 31 August 2002, eighty-one years old. The Porter name, the medieval office of the gate-keeper and the load-carrier together, carries him from a Doncaster railway-clerk's family to the directorship through which Faraday and Davy had run British chemistry into the modern world.