OBITUARY: Leslie E Howlett, 1904 1992

Dr L E Howlett of Ottawa (Canada), who died in his 88th year on 21 January 1992, was a member of the Comité International des Poids et Mesures (CIPM) from 1955 to 1968 and was President of the Comité Consultatif pour la Définition du Mètre (CCDM) from 1956. He was elected Vice-President of the CIPM in 1960 and President in 1964, and was made an honorary member following his retirement in 1968.

After taking degrees from the universities of British Colombia, Toronto and McGill, Howlett joined Canada's National Research Council in 1931, remaining with that institution for virtually all of his working life. He initially set up, singlehandedly, an optics laboratory at the NRC, being joined by a technician in 1932. By the beginning of the war in September 1939 the laboratory had a staff of four, and this was the basis from which, under Howlett's direction, and with no prior optical production in the country, a Canadian optical industry was generated, with samples of a variety of optical instruments being completed by the end of April 1940, and many thousands of precision optical components being manufactured during the course of the war.

Much of this precision optical work involved testing, measurement and calibration. Howlett's interests in such work were substantially enlarged when in 1948 he was put in charge, as Assistant Director, of applied research in the Division of Physics. This was, in effect, to be in charge of Canada's standards laboratory, and he then was naturally a candidate for membership of the CIPM. On the subsequent establishment of the Division of Applied Physics Howlett became its Director, a position he retained until his retirement.

It was under Howlett's direction that Canada progressed from a state of having only commercial and surveying standards of very moderate precision to that of possessing a world-class standards laboratory. During the period of his membership of the CIPM, he was an enthusiastic proponent of the establishment of the ionizing radiation laboratory at the BIPM, and of the introduction of quantum metrology to the SI in the form of the krypton-86 definition of the metre, adopted in 1960 during his presidency of the CCDM, and the caesium-133 definition of the second in 1967. He was responsible for establishing Metrologia, under the auspices of the CIPM, being editor from its inception in 1965 until his retirement. For these, and for many other related services, Canada and the world measurement community will remember him and his work with gratitude.