John William Strutt, first son of the second Baron Rayleigh, was born on 12 November 1842. He was a sickly boy, so his schooling was sporadic. Nevertheless, he graduated first in his year at Cambridge and was a Fellow of Trinity College until his marriage in 1871.

His father died in 1873 and he succeeded to the title as third Baron Rayleigh. He converted a stable block of his country house, Terling Place, into a laboratory. In 1879, he moved back to Cambridge as Professor of Experimental Physics, but he returned to Terling in 1884. He published The Theory of Sound in 1877/1878 and, in his lifetime, 466 scientific articles.

He received the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of argon and made numerous seminal contributions to scientific progress. He received many honours, was President of the Royal Society and one of the founding members of the Order of Merit. He had a crucial part in the establishment and development of the National Physical Laboratory. In his later years, he became interested in psychical research. Lord Rayleigh died on 30 June 1919.

Professor Peter Wells has a BSc degree in electrical engineering, gained while he was a student apprentice with the General Electric Company in Coventry. He then became a research assistant in the United Bristol Hospitals, firstly working on therapeutic applications of ultrasonics and, subsequently, on diagnostic ultrasonics, which is still his main scientific interest. He has an MSc degree in physics, a PhD degree in zoology and a DSc degree, as well as an honorary DTech degree from Lund University and an honorary MD degree from Erasmus University in Rotterdam. At the age of 35 years, he was appointed Professor of Medical Physics in the then Welsh National School of Medicine.

He returned to Bristol in 1975, as Head of the Department of Medical Physics in the now United Bristol Healthcare NHS Trust, retiring from the Professorship of Physics and Engineering in Medicine in Bristol University in 2001, where he is an Emeritus Professor. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 1983, Fellow of the Royal Society in 2003 and Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2005.