Napier Shaw

Sir William Napier Shaw was a British meteorologist and academic, born in Birmingham in 1854. He studied at Cambridge and then at the University of Berlin, and from 1879 worked at the Cavendish Laboratory, where he became assistant director in 1898. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1891 and became secretary of the Meteorological Council in 1900. He was director of the Meteorological Office from 1905 to 1907, and in 1907 he became the first professor of meteorology at Imperial College, London. In 1911 he presided over the International Meteorological Committee, forerunner of the World Meteorological Organization. In 1915 he developed the tephigram, a diagram for evaluating convective instability in the atmosphere, and he was knighted that year. He also studied air pollution and was the first to discuss smog and its health problems, co-authoring The Smoke Problem of Great Cities in 1925. His Manual of Meteorology appeared in 1926. He died in London in 1945.