Samuel Curran

Sir Samuel Crowe Curran (23 May 1912 – 25 February 1998), FRS,FRSE DL LLD, was a physicist and the first Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Strathclyde – the first of the new technical universities in Britain. He is the inventor of the scintillation counter, the proportional counter, and the proximity fuse. Colleagues generally referred to him simply as Sam Curran and latterly just as Sir Sam.

Samuel Curran was born on 23 May 1912 at Ballymena in Northern Ireland, the son of John Hamilton Curran (from Kinghorn in Fife), and his wife Sarah Carson Crowe (some sources state Sarah Owen Crowe). The family moved to Scotland soon after for his father to work as foreman of a steelworks near Wishaw. His brother Robert Curran, later a famous pathologist, was born soon after. He had two other brothers, Hamilton and John.

After schooling at Wishaw High School (where he was dux) he completed his first degree in mathematics earning first class honours, and a PhD in physics at the University of Glasgow, before taking a second PhD at the Cavendish Laboratory as a member of St John's College, Cambridge.

At the start of the Second World War Curran and Strothers went to work at the Telecommunications Research Establishment at Worth Matravers on the development of radar. In 1944, he moved to the University of California, Berkeley to participate in the Manhattan Project, developing the atomic bomb. There he invented scintillation counter by adding a photomultiplier tube to an existing scintillation crystal which had previously been viewed by the human eye to obtain a radiation count. This device is widely used to this day to measure ionizing radiation.

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