| Code | BPS/GB/23 |
| Thumbnail | 
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| Name | Myers; Charles Samuel (1873-1946); Professor; Dr, FRS, CBE |
| Title | Professor |
| Forenames | Charles Samuel |
| Surname | Myers |
| Dates | 1873-1946 |
| Epithet | Dr, FRS, CBE |
| Other Names | C.S.Myers |
| Gender | Male |
| Nationality | British |
| DatesAndPlaces | Born London 13 March 1873 Died Somerset 12 October 1946
London 1873-1893
Cambridge 1893-1896
London 1896-1898
Torres Strait, New Guinea 1898
Cambridge 189?-1922
London 1922-19?
Somerset 19?-1946 |
| Address | London |
| Relationships | Eldest son of Wolf Myers(nd),merchant and his wife Esther Eugenie Moses (nd).
Married Edith Babette (nd), youngest daughter of Isaac Seligman (nd), merchant of London. They had three daughters; Joan, Ann & ?D, and two sons, Edmund & John.
Former student and good friend of William Halse Rivers Rivers (1864-1922)
F.C.Bartlett (1886-1869) was Myers' student and protege |
| Activity | First President of the British Psychological Society (1920 to 1923).
Educated at City of London School, Myers turned towards science, and later at Gonville and Caius College Cambridge gained first-class honours in both parts of the natural sciences tripos (1893,1895) and was Arnold Gerstenberg student in 1896. He proceeded MB at St Bartholomew's Hospital, London, in 1898, but disinclined to medical practice, in that year he went with the Cambridge anthropological expedition to the Torres Straits. He joined W.H.R. Rivers and William McDougall in experimental studies of the sensory reactions of the inhabitants of that area, and he became profoundly interested in ethnic music.
In 1902 Myers returned to Cambridge to help Rivers teach the physiology of the special senses. In 1904 Myers married Edith Babette (nd). Myers remained in Cambridge to become, in succession, demonstrator, lecturer, and, in 1921, reader in experimental psychology. From 1906 to 1909 he was also Professor in Experimental Psychology at King's College, London. Having assisted in the creation of the British Journal of Psychology in 1904, Myers became its sole editor in 1914, the year in which it was acquired by the British Psychological Society. Myers raised funds to establish the first English experimental laboratory especially designed for psychology at Cambridge in 1912. When the First World War broke out in 1914 Myers travelled to Paris on his own accord and persuaded the authorities to take him on as the Hospital Registrar at Le Touquet. In December it was reported that 4% of all ranks were being sent home with 'nervous and mental breakdown' which the soldiers had coined 'shell shock'. Myers was well placed to introduce the term into medical literature after publishing his 'Contributions to shell shock' in the Lancet in February 1915. In the same year he was given a commission in the Royal Army Medical Corps and in 1916 he was appointed consultant psychologist to the British Armies in France. Frustrated with opposition to his view that shell-shock was a treatable condition after the war he returned to Cambridge. Myers later refused to appear at the 1922 Commission of Enquiry into shell-shock.In 1922 he left Cambridge for London, thereafter devoting himself to the development of the National Institute of Industrial Psychology which he had founded with Henry John Welch (nd) a director of a company of East India merchants in 1921. He was also involved in what became the the industrial health research board and was the first President of the British Psychological Society (1920 to 1923) .In 1915 Myers was elected Fellow of the Royal Society, he was appointed CBE in 1919 and received honorary degrees from the universities of Manchester (D.Sc, 1927), Calcutta (LL.D) and Pennsylvania (D.Sc). He was a Fellow (1919) and later an Honorary Fellow (1935) of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, a foreign associate of the French Societe de Psychologie, twice President of the Psychology Section of the British Association (1922, 1931), President of the International Congress of Psychology in 1923 and editor British Journal of Psychology 1911-1924.
He was elected an Honorary Member of the British Psychological Society in 1934.
Note: C.S.Myers reformed the British Psychological Society in 1919. Subsequently BPS membership increased six-fold in two years. The National Institute of Industrial Psychology (NIIP) became the chief source of employment for U.K. psychologists during the inter-war years.
An expert musician Myer's task on the Torres Straits expedition was to study auditory perception and music. The Cambridge Psychological Laboratory opened in 1912 was funded largely from his own wealth.
NIIP's Black Magic market research was a triumph. On Myers' suggestion Rowntree Cocoa Works hired a psychologist, the first post of its kind in the U.K.
Sources: F.C.Barlett, Myers, Charles Samuel (1873-1946), rev. Hugh Series, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [accessed 15 Dec 2004: <available at>http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/35175
A flair for organization: Charles Myers and the establishment of psychology in Britain, Geoff Bunn History & Philosophy of Psychology (2001), Vol.3 (1) 1-13.
Compiled by Mike Maskill, BPS Archivist for the History of Psychology Centre. |
| OtherInfo | Myers reformed the British Psychological Society in 1919. Subsequently BPS membership increased sixfold in two years. The National Institute of Industrial Psychology became the chief source of employment for U.K. psychologists during the inter-war years.An expert musician Myer's task on the Torres Straits expedition was to study auditory perception and music. The Cambridge Psychological Laboratory opened in 1912 was funded largely from his own wealth. NIIP's Black Magic market research triumph. On Myers' suggestion Rowntree Cocoa Works hired a psychologist, the first post of its kind in the U.K.
First President of The British Psychological Society 1920 to 1923. |
| Related Name | BPS/GB/239 |
| PublishedWorks | Selected Publications:
A Text-Book of Experimental Psychology, London, Edward Arnold (1909)
Introduction to Experimental Psychology (1911)
Mind and Work, London, University of London Press (1920)
Industrial Psychology in Great Britain (1926)
Ten Years of Industrial Psychology (with H.J.Welch 1932)
A Psychologist's Point of View, London: Heinemann (1933)
In the Realm of Mind , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, (1937)
Shell-Shock in France 1914-1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1940)
Attitudes to Minority Groups. Cardinel Press (1946)
Selected articles
Psychology as Applied to Engineering the 48th James Forrest Lecture delivered at The Institution of Civil Engineers, 1941-1942
Aspects of Modern Psychology, Science July 1941
In Honour of Ribot, Binet and Janet, N.I.I.P. faite a la Sorbonne. 1939
The Servant Problem. Occupational Psychology 13, 77-88 (1939)
The Mental Hygiene of Intellectual Work, 1937
The Use of Gruesome and Humorous Propaganda for Accident Prevention, NIIP 1936
Coal: The Immediate Future a Psychologists View, 1936
The Psychological Approach to the Problem of Road Accidents, Nature, 1935
The Relation of Acts and Contents of Consciousness, Acta Psychologica, Vol. I, 1935
The Relation of Acts and Contents of Consciousness, The British Journal of Psychology (general section), 1933
The Psychology of Musical Appreciation, Memoirs and Proceedings of the Manchester literary and Philosophical Society, 1932-1933
Human Improvability, The Bristol Medico-Chirurgical Journal, 1932
The Absurdity of any Mind-Body Relation, L.T.Hobhouse Memorial Trust Lectures No.2, 1932
The Herbert Spencer Lecture ,"Psychological Conceptions in Other Sciences" Oxford 1929
The Influence of Ultra-Violet Rays on Industrial Output, Journal of the National Institute of Industrial Psychology, 1928
Edward Bradford Titchener (1867-1927) , British Journal of Psychology (General Section), 1928
On Consciousness, British Journal of Medical Psychology, 1925
Industrial Psychology: Its Scope and Effect on Efficiency, the Proceedings of the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow, 1922-1923
Industrial Psychology in Relation to Coal Mining, Memoirs & Proceedings of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, 1922-1923
The Conceptions of Nervous Energy (III), British Journal of Psychology (General section), 1923
The Human Side of Industry. The Journal of the National Institute of Industrial Psychology, I, 309-312 (1923)
Individual Differences in Listening to Music, the British Journal of Psychology (General section), 1922
The Relations of Complex and Sentiment, J. of Psych. XIII
Left-Handedness and the Reversal of Letters, British Journal of Psychology (General section), 1921
Psychology and Industry, British Journal of Psychology" March 1920
Instinct and the Unconscious, British Journal of Psychology, 1919
A Final Contribution to the Study of Shell Shock, the Lancet, 1919
Contributions to the Study of Shell Shock. The Lancet (1915)
The Influence of Timbre and Loudness on the Localization of Sounds, the proceedings of the Royal Society, 1914
Are The Intensity Differences of Sensation Quantitative, the British Journal of Psychology, 1913
A Case of Synaesthesia, the Journal of Psychology, 1911
In the perception of the Direction of Sound, the Proceedings of the Royal Society, 1908
The Ethnological Study of Music, Anthropological Essays presented to Edward Burnett Taylor 1907
The Taste-Names of Primitive Peoples, Journal of Psychology, 1904
An account of some skills discovered at Brandon, Suffolk, Journal of The Anthropological Institute, November, 113-128 (1896) |
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| Source | Sources: F.C.Barlett, Myers, Charles Samuel (1873-1946), rev. Hugh Series, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [accessed 15 Dec 2004: <available at>http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/35175
A flair for organization: Charles Myers and the establishment of psychology in Britain, Geoff Bunn History & Philosophy of Psychology (2001), Vol.3 (1) 1-13 |
| Conventions | International Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families - ISAAR(CPF) - Ottawa 1996 ISBN ISBN 0-9696035-3-3
National Council on Archives, Rules for the Construction of Personal, Place and Corporate Names, 1997 |
| RefNo | Title | Dates |
| MYERS/001/05/01 | Letters to Myers 1902-1911 | 1902-1911 |
| PHO/001/02/410 | Pear, Tom Hatherley - Photographs | 20th century |
| PHO/001/06/03/12 | Myers, Charles Samuel - Photograph | 20th Century |
| PHO/001/04/08/29 | Torres Straits Expedition 1898 - Photograph | 1898 |
| KENNA/2/4/4 | Notes, Drafts and Research Material (Individuals and Societies) | 1960s-1970s |
| BPS/001/7/01/05/04 | Myers-Spearman Memorial fund | 1947-1949 |
| MYERS/001/02 | Charles Samuel Myers (1873-1946) Press Cuttings on War-Time Industrial and Educational Conditions | 1937-1940 |
| MYERS/001/05 | Charles Samuel Myers (1873-1946) Correspondence | 1902-1911 |
| KENNA/1/6 | Galton Symposium & Obituary Notices | 1946-1976 |
| PHO/001/02/384 | Myers, Charles Samuel - Photograph | c. 20th Century |
| AUD/001/46/06 | Seligman, Brenda Zara (1883-1965) - Interview Transcript | 1 March 1957 |
| MYERS/001/04 | Charles Samuel Myers (1873-1946) Memorial Album | 1991 |
| MYERS/001/03 | Charles Samuel Myers (1873-1946) Notes and Musical Manuscript Notes | 1900-1940? |
| MYERS/001 | Charles Samuel Myers (1873-1946) Papers | 1901-1946 |
| KENNA/1/4/1 | Lucy G Fildes - Correspondence, Articles and Theses | 1916-1928 |
| MYERS/001/01 | Charles Samuel Myers (1873-1946) Reprints and Pamphlets | 1902-1946 |
| HEARN/1/1 | History of Psychology | 1941-1984 |
| AUD/001/09 | Pear, Thomas H. - Recording | 1957-1978 |
| BPS/001/3/02/01/01 | BPS Council Papers 1946 | 1946 |
| AUD/001/01 | Myers, Mrs C.S. & Pear, T.H. - Recordings | 1960 |