Critical Focus | Ten Years and Counting
THE MICROSCOPE
2019, Volume 67:4, pp. 171–182
DOI
https://doi.org/10.59082/COKY4498
AUTHOR
Brian J. Ford
EXCERPT
Don’t laugh. This is merely a chronological curiosity — but today’s article has me entering the eighth decade of being a columnist. The first commission I had was in the Fifties, when (in September 1959) I began writing my weekly “Science and You” column for the South Wales Echo, one of the most widely read regional British newspapers at that time, published in Cardiff. Soon after, I began appearing on television, and this was when my first formal portrait was photographed (it appears, just this once, on the masthead above). The editor of the Echo, Jack Wiggins, taught me so much, and many of his writers became nationally famous. He also attempted to advance my writing career by contacting the editor of the Guardian newspaper and proposing that they publish my articles, but their science editor rejected the idea. That person was John Maddox, later Sir John Maddox, when he went on to become the editor of Nature. By that time, he and I were good friends, and chuckled when we reminisced about the way he once turned me down. He was right though — those early articles were crude.