Thomas Ralph Merton

Sir Thomas Ralph Merton KBE, DSc, FRS (12 January 1888 – 10 October 1969) was an English physicist, inventor and art collector. He is particularly noted for his work on spectroscopy and diffraction gratings.

Born in Wimbledon, Surrey, Thomas Ralph Merton was the only son of Emile Ralph Merton and Helen, daughter of Thomas Meates, a descendant of Sir Thomas Meutas, Secretary to Sir Francis Bacon. Emile Merton was for a time in the family metal trading business as a partner in Henry R. Merton & Co. which was started in London by his eldest brother in 1860. Another brother William Ralph Merton founded the Metallgesellschaft in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1881, which became the second largest company in Germany and the largest non-ferrous mining company in the world. The two companies worked closely with one another, along with the American Metal Company in New York City.

Thomas was educated at Farnborough School and Eton College, where Dr T. C. Porter, the physics master, encouraged him to begin research. Between leaving Eton in 1905 and going up to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1906, he worked at King's College London. He went to Balliol with distinguished fellow Etonians Julian Grenfell, Ronald Knox, and Julian Huxley.

In view of his delicate health and his promise as a scientist, Oxford allowed Merton to go straight to a research thesis without taking his final exams; this was an unusual privilege. His investigation of the properties of solutions of caesium nitrate earned him a BSc in 1910. Meanwhile, he had been reading widely and conceived many ideas for improving the techniques of spectroscopy. While still a schoolboy he had set up a room in his father's house as a primitive laboratory.

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