C. L. M. Bell (1931–2010)

Colin Bell was born on 5 December 1931. He won a place at Chichester Grammar School, where he shone at mathematics, and a State Scholarship to study chemistry at Oxford where he studied with Sir Rex Richards between 1952 and 1956 who was working on nuclear magnetic resonance. Colin’s National Service in the RAF working on radar was useful in this endeavour.

Colin was recruited by the British Rubber Producers’ Research Association in Welwyn Garden City by another Oxford-trained physical chemist, Peter Allen, and Colin was to spend his entire working life with the natural rubber industry in laboratories located in Hertfordshire, apart from a brief interlude of a year at Princeton University working with John Gillham on automating the torsional pendulum.

Colin’s achievements in the design of scientific instruments is covered in a chapter entitled Physical testing and automation in Natural Rubber Science and Technology; edited by A.D. Roberts (Oxford University Press, 1988). This book was produced to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of the Association and this chapter encapsulates much of his work, notably on the automation of testing tensile strength and in the design of simple temperature controlled ovens to measure raw rubber properties. Colin’s contribution to the industry was recognized in his being awarded the Malaysian Rubber Board’s Gold Medal in 1993.

Colin also contributed to advanced information retrieval systems which incorporated features from linguistics and led to MORPHS (Minicomputer Operated Retrieval, Partially Heuristic, System). Much of the programming was in machine code or FORTRAN 4 and Colin greatly enjoyed the intellectual stimulus of designing very economical code. He did not approve of more recent systems which exploit “brute force methods” and considered MORPHS to be far in advance of Google.