麻豆约拍

This week Adam Walton meets A J S "Bill" Williams, 聽one of the Royal Society of Chemistry's "175 Faces of Chemistry". The list features many famous names including Marie Curie, Joseph Priestly, Alfred Nobel and Michael Faraday, and celebrates achievement in science, and chemistry in particular.

Bill Williams is now 94, and has had a remarkable life - training RAF pilots in WWII, a lifelong passion for playing music, and a long career teaching chemistry, both as a lecturer at Aberystwyth University and presenting a hugely successful series of lectures for schoolchildren, which have been given in front of many tens of thousands of pupils.

During the second World War, having trained as an RAF pilot in the USA, he became an instructor, teaching pilots how to use "the beam", an early form of guided navigation, transmitting dots and dashes to aid the return to the airfield.

He was instrumental in the transformation of the chemistry department at Aberystwyth University, when he became a lecturer in the 1950s, overseeing a major revamp which saw the department triple in size.

In 1969 he devised a lecture on "colour and dyes" which toured Britain demonstrating chemistry to many thousands of school pupils.

Later, in the 1990s, the "Science And Energy" lecture gave hands-on experience of science and chemistry to tens of thousands of primary school children, and again, toured Britain to great acclaim. That lecture has now been made available online by the Royal Society of Chemistry.