We are counting down to the first Manchester Day on June 20 – a chance to celebrate the city’s history, culture and place in the world. So why should we be proud of Manchester? Paul Taylor begins a series of features by looking at the city’s contribution to science

When the Wonders of the Solar System were being explained recently on BBC TV, the voice was reassuringly local.

The gobsmacking scale of Creation was conveyed to us by Chadderton-born Brian Cox, a professor of particle physics at Manchester University. How apt. For it was a Manchester University institution, Jodrell Bank, which had done so much over the last half-century to observe all those wonders.

And who was the astronomer and mathematician who, with his friend Jeremiah Horrocks, observed the first recorded transit of Venus in 1639 – watching that planet passing like a speck across the face of the sun? William Crabtree of Broughton Spout, Salford, who thus played a part in the birth of modern astronomy in Britain.

Delve back through the history of science and you find Manchester playing a role in everything from scouring the heavens to identifying the sub-atomic building blocks of matter.

Poverty

Mancunian know-how went into the inventions which powered the industrial revolution, just as they went into kick-starting the computer age. Look through the list of Nobel prize-winners, and Manchester crops up again and again.

But let’s begin with a self-taught scientist who glimpsed the future ... and didn’t like what he saw. Lawrence Earnshaw was born in 1707 into a poor weaving family in Mottram. He had little formal education, but became fascinated by clocks, creating an astronomical clock which showed the motion of the Earth, the position of the moon and stars.

In 1753, Earnshaw invented a contraption which could spin and weave cotton. He showed it to his neighbours, then, realising it would destroy the livelihoods of local textile workers, he destroyed it. Others, such as Preston-born Richard Arkwright and Bolton-born Samuel Crompton, perfected similar machines within years, and sealed their place in history. Earnshaw died in poverty in 1767.

By contrast, when John Dalton died in 1844, 40,000 people were said to have marched in his funeral procession. Dalton was born to a Quaker family near Cockermouth in the Lake District, and came to Manchester as a teacher. At 27, he read a paper to Manchester Literary And Philosophical Society, giving the first account of colour-blindness – still known by some as Daltonism. He also studied gases, concluding that elements combine to make compounds, becoming the first to create a table of atomic weights.

As an old man, Dalton was reduced to tutoring the children of well-to-do families. One such pupil was James Prescott Joule, born in New Bailey Street, Salford, in 1818. Joule was so enthused that he created a laboratory in the cellar of his parents’ home, and mixed with scientists and engineers at the Manchester Literary And Philosophical Society. Eventually he proved his theory that it was possible to convert mechanical work directly into heat. The unit of energy, the joule, was named in his honour.

Telescopes

As the founder of atomic theory, John Dalton began a Manchester tradition. Through Manchester University’s physics department passed ten Nobel laureates. A 1912 photograph of the university’s physics department shows Ernest Rutherford, discoverer of the atomic nucleus, Hans Geiger, inventor of the Geiger counter, James Chadwick, discoverer of the neutron and Henry Moseley, who identified atomic number as the nuclear charge and would probably have won the 1916 Nobel Prize for Physics had he not died at the Battle of Gallipoli.

Another to find renown via that physics department was Sir Bernard Lovell. His work at Manchester University with radar and cosmic rays was made difficult by interference from the trams going along Oxford Road. So in 1945, he moved his work to huts on land owned by the botany department in Cheshire.

Jodrell Bank, of which Sir Bernard was director for 35 years until 1980, became the world-renowned site for radio telescopes which played a role in research into meteors, quasars and pulsars, the tracking of space missions and even the search for evidence of life on other planets. Jodrell Bank is the hub of the Merlin array of seven radio telescopes across the UK, now connected by optical fibre links.

One of Manchester’s most significant scientific firsts came in 1948 when the display tube of the Small Scale Experimental Machine, nicknamed Baby, lit up with the correct answer to a problem set it 52 minutes earlier. It may have weighed a ton, filled a room and been less powerful than the cheapest calculator of today, but in creating the world’s first stored-program computer, Freddie Williams, Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill had invented the modern computer at Manchester University.

Fertility

The team knew that their valve-laden contraption could revolutionise weather forecasting, by allowing complex calculations to be speeded up. What they could not foresee was that their invention would be at the heart of the greatest period of technological advance mankind has ever known.

Already feted for his wartime work for government code-breakers at Bletchley Park, Alan Turing came to Manchester University in 1948 as a reader in mathematics. He worked on programs for Manchester Mark 1, the successor to the Baby computer.

Turing also theorised about artificial intelligence, published a paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, in the journal Mind and was made a fellow of the Royal Society. The ultimate promise of Turing’s genius went unfulfilled. Convicted of gross indecency, he was banned from helping his country, as, during the Cold War, it was thought that homosexuals may be targeted by spies. In 1954, Turing bit into a cyanide-laced apple at his home in Wilmslow and died, aged 41.

Manchester has for many years been a centre of medical excellence. Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital has a history stretching back to 1829 when it was the first hospital of its kind in Britain. The Christie has a worldwide reputation in treatment and research into cancer.

But one of the greatest-ever medical breakthroughs happened up the road in Oldham in 1978. Oxfordshire-born gynaecologist Patrick Steptoe came to work at Oldham General Hospital in 1951, pursuing an interest in fertility problems.

He used laparoscopy to observe the reproductive tract, and later to harvest eggs from infertile women. In 1966, he began working with Robert Edwards, a physiologist at Cambridge

University who was the son of a railwayman and had been educated at Manchester Central High School.

Miracle

By 1968, Edwards had been able to successfully fertilise an egg extracted by Steptoe. Within two years, they had seen eggs develop in the laboratory to the point of cell division. In 1972, the pair began to implant embryos for the first time, though none survived to full term.

As the world came to know of their work, Steptoe and

Edwards faced a moral backlash, some comparing these

attempts at "test tube babies" with the laboratory-created infants in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The concept of in vitro fertilisation was condemned by the Pope.

But, in 1978, something happened which newspapers around the world proclaimed a "miracle".

An egg taken from 33-year-old Leslie Brown had been fertilised in the laboratory using husband Gilbert’s sperm. The two-day-old embryo was implanted back in Mrs Brown and on July 25, a healthy 5lbs 12oz baby was born. Louise Brown was the world’s first IVF child.

Of all our region’s scientific endeavours, this was perhaps the one which had the most tangible effect on the human race. The European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology estimates that since 1978, 3.5m babies have been born by the IVF method pioneered in Oldham.

Manchester’s Nobel laureates

Manchester University has 23 Nobel Prize winners among current and former staff and students. They include:

• Joseph John Thomson. Born in Cheetham Hill in 1856, Thomson studied at Owens College, Manchester – now Manchester University – from the age of 14, and then Trinity College, Cambridge, where he remained. In 1897, through studies of cathode rays, he proved the existence of very light negatively charged particles the world soon came to know as electrons. He received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1906.
• Charles Thomson Rees Wilson. Born in Edinburgh in 1869, Wilson was brought to Manchester after his father died when he was just four. He studied biology at Owens College, Manchester, and went on to Cambridge. He invented the cloud chamber, which enabled physicists to track the paths of individual atoms. Shared the 1927 Nobel Prize for Physics.
• Ernest Rutherford. Born in New Zealand in 1871, he worked in Cambridge with Manchester-born Joseph John Thomson and came to Manchester University in 1907. In 1908, Rutherford was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry for his "investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances". His investigations into alpha rays led to his postulation of the concept of the nucleus.
• Danish-born Niels Bohr, who studied with both JJ Thomson at Cambridge and Rutherford in Manchester, went on to receive the 1922 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on the investigation of the structure of atoms.
• James Chadwick. Born in 1891 in Bollington, Cheshire, Chadwick studied at Manchester High School and Owens College, and worked with Rutherford in Manchester, then in Berlin, with Hans Geiger, leading to his internment as a security threat during the First World War. Chadwick returned to England to work at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. In 1930, he identified the neutron and received the 1935 Nobel Prize for Physics.
• Patrick Blackett, Professor of Physics at Manchester University from 1937 to 1953, was co-discoverer of the positron, and won the 1948 Nobel Prize for Physics.
• Arthur Harden. Born in Manchester in 1865, Harden studied chemistry at Owens College and returned to the university as a lecturer. Awarded the 1929 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for investigations into the fermentation of sugar and enzymes.

»Tomorrow: Past, present and future of Manchester’s industry