After a time the library of the Philosophical Society, situated at the centre of the new museums and lecture rooms, was secured, and the measurements were taken there by Mr. At first, the Committee Room of the Union Society was put at our disposal, but this was not very long available, as some demur was made by the authorities there to the use of the room by undergraduates who were not members of the Society. “Some difficulty was experienced at first in choosing a suitable room in which measurements could be carried out, as the University had but little available space, and unless some room could be found the position of which would bring the subject prominently under the notice of the students, no very extensive results could be hoped for.John Venn (most well known for the ‘Venn diagram’), then Lecturer in Moral Science, Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and Secretary of the Anthropological Institute of which Galton was President, endeavoured to carry out a study of Cambridge undergraduates using Galton’s techniques. Anthropometrics at Cambridge 1885 - 1886īefore the arrival of Cattell, Galton had presented the Rede Lecture at Cambridge in June 1884 on the topic “The nature, principles and objects of the quantitative estimate of some of the less commonly and less easily measured of the human faculties”, and presented the University with several instruments similar to those he had used in his South Kensington Anthropometric Laboratory. On leaving Leipzig, and after a brief visit to America, Cattell returned to Europe to take up an appointment at the University of Cambridge in October 1886 as ‘Fellow Commoner’ at St John’s College and lecturer in the University. During his period in Leipzig, Cattell had been in frequent correspondence with Francis Galton at his Anthropometric Laboratory in London (Galton, 1887) and he quickly saw the potential for synergising Wundt’s psychophysics with Galton’s mathematical approach to the examination of individual differences. " In the Cavendish Laboratory was also set up apparatus for research and this was the beginning of the first British laboratory of psychology" (Cattell, Early Psychological Laboratories,1928).Ĭattell, an American, completed his Ph.D., entitled ‘Psychometric Investigations’ (Cattell, 1886), with Wundt at Leipzig.The first laboratory dedicated to the subject was set up within the Cavendish Physics Laboratory at the University of Cambridge by James McKeen Cattell in 1887. It is a little-known fact that psychometrics as a science began in Cambridge between 18. The Birth of Psychometrics in Cambridge, 1886 - 1889
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