Charles Chree

Charles Chree was a British physicist, an authority on terrestrial magnetism and atmospheric electricity, and for 32 years Superintendent of Kew Observatory. He was born in Lintrathen, Forfarshire, Scotland, on 5 May 1860, the second son of the Reverend Charles Chree, and was educated at the Grammar School in Old Aberdeen, the University of Aberdeen, where he graduated MA in 1879, and the University of Cambridge, where he graduated as Sixth Wrangler in 1883. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1897, his candidacy citing memoirs on the effects of pressure on the magnetisation of cobalt, the conduction of heat in liquids and the stresses and strains in elastic solids. He was awarded the James Watt medal by the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1905, was President of the Physical Society of London from 1908 to 1910, and won the Royal Society Hughes Medal in 1919. He died on 12 August 1928.