About

The WCSIM promotes the craft of scientific instrument making and the exchange of ideas and information by members and guests through meetings, visits, lectures and social events.

The members are all linked with the manufacture or use of scientific instruments. The Company advances the craft through traditional apprenticeships supervised by Liverymen, and through its educational trust fund. The fund provides grants, bursaries and scholarships at A level, undergraduate and post graduate and research fellow levels.

Formation of the livery

The Guild was formed in October 1955 by members of the Industry and with the support of the Clockmakers and the Spectacle Makers Companies, to foster scientific instrument making and to promote goodwill in the science and craft of measurement and instrumentation. One of the founder firms at that time was known to date back to 1640. Grant of Arms was achieved in 1956 and the Letters Patent as a Livery Company of City of London were granted in 1963.

The Charitable and Educational Trust

One of the primary objectives of the Company is to encourage young people to particpate in the craft through gratns, prizes, scholarships and apprenticehsips. The Company has relationships with a number of universities as well as the armed forces, the Young Engineers program and the Arkwright Scholarship Scheme. The Trust has been built up over the years through regular donations from Liverymen, endowments and investment gains. The Trust operates under a Trust Deed and has a group of managing trustees including the Master, who chairs the Trust, the Deputy Master, the Honorary Treasurer and two Past Masters. The Charity also provides some limited financial support to Liverymen and Freemen who have fallen on hard times.

Registered Charity Number: 221332

" If anybody says he can think about quantum problems without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them. "
Niels Henrik David Bohr (1885-1962) Danish physicist.
" A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent, unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty, until found effective. "
Edward Teller
" I think science has enjoyed an extraordinary success because it has such a limited and narrow realm in which to focus its efforts. Namely, the physical universe. "
Ken Jenkins
" If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate "
Henry J. Tillman
" Nature composes some of her loveliest poems for the microscope and the telescope. "
Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends, 1972
" The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny..." "
Isaac Asimov
" Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing. "
Wernher Von Braun
" Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men. "
Jean Rostand
" Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house. "
Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis, 1905
" The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions. "
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le Cru et le cuit, 1964
" Facts are not science - as the dictionary is not literature. "
Martin H. Fischer
" Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover. "
Bertrand Russell
" DNA was the first three-dimensional Xerox machine. "
Kenneth Boulding