Colonel B D SHAW Centenary Celebrations

The B D SHAW Lecture

Around 1930, Professor Kipping was concerned that the lectures of the Nottingham Student Chemical and Physical Society did not have sufficient excitement, so he asked Shaw to do something about it.
 

The `Explosives Lecture' was born! From then until 1990, Shaw gave the lecture more than 1600 times in Universities, industry, at the Royal Institution, conference halls, hotels, fire stations and village halls, from Nottingham to Rome and California.
 

The lecture was televised by the BBC on `Horizon' in 1969 to well over one million viewers. Excerpts of the lecture have been featured in many TV programmes. Shaw's singular knowledge of explosives and firearms was widely recognised. He acted as an Expert Scientific Witness in many notorious legal cases including that of the `Angry Brigade' in 1972. In 1979 the University of Nottingham awarded an Honorary DSc to Colonel Shaw and, in 1985, he won a unique Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry in recognition of his work.
 
 

 
 
To mark his 90th birthday, the University of Nottingham endowed the Shaw Medal and Lecture to honour the enormous contribution which he has made to the popularising of Science, and of Chemistry in particular, and as encouragement to others to continue that tradition. Fittingly, Col. Shaw was the first recipient.
 

- B D SHAW introduction page
- Department of Chemistry
- The University of Nottingham Web Site