Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, 1869-1959

Abstract Charles Thomson Rees Wilson was born on 14 February 1869 at the farmhouse of Crosshouse near Glencorse in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh. He was the youngest of eight children by the two marriages of his father John Wilson, a very progressive sheep farmer, whose family had farmed in the neighbourhood for generations, and who himself had published papers in the Journal of the Highland and Agricultural Society on various experiments in farming. Charles’s mother, Annie Clark Harper, was a second cousin of her husband and came of a Glasgow family, who in the eighteenth century had been prosperous thread makers and muslin manufacturers, as well as burgesses of the city, but whose business had latterly declined. Some of the family attended Glasgow University. The Harpers had literary inclinations: George Harper, Professor of English Literature at Princeton and a distinguished author, was a second cousin of Charles.