History

The International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) was established in 1922 in Brussels with 13 founding member countries: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Japan, Norway, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and the Union of South Africa. The decision to create an international physics union was taken at the 1922 General Assembly of the International Research Council (IRC), which had been founded in 1919 to coordinate international scientific collaboration across disciplines. The first President of IUPAP was Sir William Henry Bragg, Nobel Laureate in Physics (1915), who served from 1922 to 1931. Henri Abraham was elected as the first Secretary. He continued in this role until his deportation and murder at Auschwitz in 1943.

As part of the celebrations for its Centennial, the IUPAP Executive Council launched the project entitled “One Hundred Years of IUPAP: A History”, directed by Roberto Lalli and Jaume Navarro. The project involved the digitization of IUPAP’s institutional archival documents, dispersed across several repositories, to make them available for historical research. The materials became the foundation of an in-depth historical investigation into IUPAP’s first century, carried out by professional historians of science. The results were published in the Open Access volume Globalizing Physics: One Hundred Years of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, edited by Lalli and Navarro and published by Oxford University Press. [Link title book to https://academic.oup.com/book/58182/chapter/480375012]

See, also the booklet published for the 70^th anniversary of IUPAP foundation