[W. E. S. Turner, chemist and pioneer of scientific glass technology.] Eight Typed Letters Signed and one Autograph Letter Signed to George Menzies, Secretary, Royal Academy of Arts.

See his entry in the Oxford DNB. The fibre-glass dress in which his second wife Helen married him is exhibited in his museum at the University of Sheffield, and was included in the 2010 BBC radio series A History of the Word in 100 Objects. The recipient George Kenneth Menzies (1869-1954) was Secretary to the Royal Society of Arts between 1917 and 1935. The nine items are in good condition, on lightly aged paper, and are folded for postage. All nine are signed 'W. E. S. Turner'. Each bears the stamp of the RSA, some with manuscript docketting. Six of the last seven items relate to a lecture by Turner on ‘Heat Resisting Glasses’, give by Turner at the RSA on 28 February 1923. On 2 October 1922 he responds to an offer to give a lecture with two proposed subjects, the second being ‘Some Recent Developments in Glass Melting Furnaces’: ‘I should prefer, if no other lecture is to be delivered which touches on the subject of the composition of glass, to take the first-named subject, leaving over the other until a later date.’ On 17 January 1923 he suggests two individuals to take the chair at the lecture, Sir Charles A. Parsons and Sir Herbert Jackson. In the autograph letter, 17 February 1923, he discusses the manuscript of his paper: ‘By the time the proof arrives I hope I may be in possession of a report I am expecting from Czecho-Slovakia & of certain experiments proceding here and be able to add a few lines to complete the paper.’ In the same letter also discusses lantern slides and ‘table space’. He returns the corrected proof on 24 February 1923, and explains: ‘I am still awaiting receipt of a report from Prague, however, from which I should like to quote certain data. Moreover, certain rather interesting results of experiments being carried out here should be available by Wednesday and for this reason I should rather be glad if the paper could be kept in proof form so that I may put in the final corrections after Wednesday and before publication.’ The final letter, 29 April 1924, requests 150 copies of the off-print of the lecture, as ‘[i]t is customary for us to reprint or bind together every year, reprints of papers published from this Department’. Other letters concern providing the RSA with a list of members of the Society of Glass Technology (1919), the hiring of the RSA hall by that body (1920) and the ‘corrected proof of the author’s reply’ (1923).