Peter Roget



Peter Mark Roget (January 18 1779, London–September 12 1869), the son of a Swiss clergyman, studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and became a distinguished physician and lexicographer. He was a natural theologian.

He is best known for creating the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (Roget's Thesaurus), a classified collection of related words.

Roget died while on holiday and is buried in the cemetery of St James's Church, West Malvern, Worcestershire.

Roget in science and technology
Roget helped found the School of Medicine at the University of Manchester. He was also one of the founders of the Medical and Chirurgical Society of London, which later became the Royal Society of Medicine, and he was a secretary of the Royal Society.

In 1815, he invented the log-log slide rule, allowing a person to perform exponential and root calculations simply. This was especially helpful for calculations involving fractional powers and roots.

On December 9 1824, Roget presented a paper entitled Explanation of an optical deception in the appearance of the spokes of a wheel when seen through vertical apertures. This article is often incorrectly referenced as either On the Persistence of Vision with Regard to Human Motion or Persistence of Vision with regard to Moving Objects, likely due to erroneous citations by film historians Terry Ramsaye and Arthur Knight (see Anderson and Anderson below).

While Roget's explanation of the illusion was probably wrong, his consideration of the illusion of motion was an important point in the history of film, and probably influenced the development of the Thaumatrope, the Phenakistiscope and the Zoetrope.

He wrote the fifth Bridgewater Treatise, Animal and Vegetable Physiology considered with reference to Natural Theology.

Roget in art and culture
Roget was the focus of the play "Synonymy" by Randy Wyatt. It tells the story of a graduate student named Gordon who rents out the last known residence of Roget to inspire him as he works on his dissertation regarding the English language and Roget's Thesaurus. The building, which was soon to be torn down, created a gateway in which Gordon found himself traveling back in time and meeting Roget and his daughter, Kate. "Synonymy" premiered at Minnesota State University's Department of Theatre and Dance in December 2005.

He is also a character in the play "An Experiment with an Air Pump" by Shelagh Stephenson, which concerns scientific ethics. The play takes place in the household of Joseph Fenwick in 1799 - Roget appears as one of Fenwick's assistants.

More recently, he was lampooned by the Australian Chaser team on the 23/5/2007 episode of The Chaser's War on Everything with the song "I am Thesaurus", a parody of The Beatles' "I am the Walrus".