Shelford Bidwell

Born in Thetford in 1848, Shelford Bidwell became an English physicist, inventor, and writer with a gift for explaining new ideas clearly. Although he was called to the bar in 1875, later accounts note that he moved away from legal work and devoted himself more fully to scientific research.

He is especially associated with early "telephotography" experiments, an important step in the long history of sending images electrically. His work ranged across electricity, optics, and practical devices, and he published many papers for leading scientific bodies of his time.

Bidwell was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1886 and later served as president of the Physical Society from 1897 to 1899. He died in 1909, leaving behind a body of work that linked Victorian curiosity with technologies that would become far more familiar in the twentieth century.