William Morgan (actuary)
Welsh physician, physicist, statistician and actuary
William Morgan, FRS (26 May (O.S.) 1750 – 4 May 1833) was a British physician, physicist and statistician, who is considered the father of modern actuarial science. He is also credited with being the first to record the "invisible light" produced when a current is passed through a partly evacuated glass tube: "the first x-ray tube".
Life
He was born in Bridgend, Glamorgan, Wales, son to physician William Morgan and Sarah (sister of Richard Price). William's brother was George Cadogan Morgan. At eighteen he received medical training at Guy's Hospital, London, working also as an apothecary to pay his way. He did not complete his training, but after one year returned to Bridgend to join his father's practice. He was not popular with his father's patients: they thought him inexperienced and they resented receiving treatment from someone with a deformity—Morgan suffered from a club foot. After his father's death he left medicine and in 1774, on the recommendation of his mother's brother, the renowned Richard Price, he was appointed Assistant Actuary of the Equitable Life Assurance Society. In February 1775, after the death of John Pocock, he was elected Actuary. By the time he retired on 2 December 1830, 56 years later at the age of 80, he had laid the foundations of the actuarial profession —in fact the term "actuarial" became attached to the profession because of his title.
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This entry incorporates text from “William Morgan (actuary)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.