John Jacob Fox, 1874 - 1944

Abstract

John Jacob Fox, son of Mark and Hanna Fox, was born in Essex on 12 April 1874, the eldest of a family of six, of whom five were brothers. His ancestors were sea-faring people or in business. The brothers were teachers, one, Charles, being Lecturer in Cambridge on the practice of teaching and the author of a book on The psychology of the mind . In none of the others was a scientific bent observed. It appears that his mother was intellectually remarkable, and it was due to her that Fox was allowed to pursue a scientific instead of the business career which was being marked out for him. When very young he accompanied his parents to the United States for a few years, but on return to England he attended a private school and later that of St Thomas, Charterhouse, London, E.C. Thence he entered Government Service in 1896 as an Assistant in the Government Laboratory, under Professor (later Sir) T. E. Thorpe, going on to the permanent staff in 1904. During his early years in the Government Laboratory as a Civil Servant attached to the Excise Department, according to the arrangements made by Thorpe for assistants, he attended courses in Chemistry at the Royal College of Science, for which he had a scholarship (1897-1899), but at this stage did not proceed to a degree. With the object of keeping up his chemical studies he then took evening classes at the East London Technical (now Queen Mary) College from 1899 onwards, and there had the good fortune to come under the influence of Professor J. T. Hewitt, who from the first, finding a student who had a genuine interest in science for its own sake, got him to do some original work of which the results were communicated to the Chemical Society (1). Then, as always, a strenuous worker, he spent many hours at the College and the ‘evening classes’ would often last from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Having taken from there the B.Sc. by research in 1908, he proceeded to the D.Sc. which he took in 1910, having submitted a Thesis.