Papers of Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington

These manuscripts are all in Eddington's own hand. None is explicitly dated. C1/1, C1/2(a) and C1/4 were printed and have been dated by their respective dates of publication. C1/3 is an early version of part of a report communicated by the Joint Permanent Eclipse Committee to the Royal Society; see Sir F. W. Dyson, A. S. Eddington, and C. Davidson, 'A Determination of the Deflection of Light by the Sun's Gravitational Field, from Observations Made at the Total Eclipse of May 29, 1919' (Phil. Trans. A, ccxx (June 1920), 291-333). The manuscript in question is a draft of the first part of Section IV (pp. 312-14). The latest date mentioned in it is 14 July 1919 and the report was received by the Society on 30 October.

The latest publication referred to in the untitled paper on tensors (C1/5) is from 1923, so the paper has been assigned to the middle of the same decade. C1/6, entitled 'The Cavendish Laboratory', is the manuscript of a pamphlet published in February 1935. (A copy of the pamphlet is in the University Library (Cam.b.935.15).) It includes a description of Eddington's visit to the Laboratory in October 1934. W. E. Burcham described the circumstances of its composition as follows: 'towards the end of 1934 Sir Arthur Eddington wrote a pamphlet describing the Cavendish and its achievements to form the basis of "an appeal to the friends of science and of Cambridge."' The pamphlet was published by the Cambridge University Press in February 1935 and privately circulated to possible benefactors both within and outside Cambridge. ('The Cavendish High-voltage Laboratory 1935-39', Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, vol. liii, pp. 121-2.) The title appears under the heading 'Miscellaneous' in D2/3. C1/7, entitled 'The Nature of the Stars', is headed 'Broadcast - Calcutta' above the title, though the words were later struck through. It is probably the text of a broadcast made by Eddington in India in 1937 (cf. Douglas, pp. 105-6). Two lectures of the same title are listed in D2/3.