Perhaps the most famous resident of Northmoor Road was the Oxford academic and author
J. R. R. Tolkien. He lived at No. 22 in 1926–30 and then a larger house at No. 20 in 1930–47. Tolkien wrote
The Hobbit and most of
The Lord of the Rings while living at No. 20. There is now a
blue plaque on the house and it has been
Grade II listed (Entry Number: 1391361) since 2004. Tolkien later lived at
Sandfield Road in
Headington. According to a 2019 report, much of No. 20's interior remains "largely unaltered" since the 1940s. Another resident was Sir
Martin Wood, who in 1959 set up his company,
Oxford Instruments, in his garden shed at his house in Northmoor Road. Oxford Instruments, the first significant spin-out company from the
University of Oxford, made the first superconducting magnets for
MRI scanners and became a leader in medical technology. Later, in the 1980s, Wood founded the
Northmoor Trust, aimed at promoting
nature conservation at
Little Wittenham and
Wittenham Clumps in the
Oxfordshire countryside south of
Oxford. From 1994 to 2014,
Michael O'Regan, OBE, and his wife Jane, lived at No. 6 Northmoor Road. O’Regan was co-founder of
Research Machines, a company that supplies computer hardware and software for the educational market. In 1998, O'Regan founded the Hamilton Trust, a charity that provides resources for teachers. The German Indologist and philologist
Rudolf Hoernlé lived for several years at No. 8 Northmoor Road, dying there (during the
Spanish flu pandemic) in 1918.
Charles Firth (1857–1936), Professor of
History at the
University of Oxford, lived at No. 2, a distinctive house with a two-storey bow-front, designed by
E. W. Allfrey in 1903–8. The house is in the
Queen Anne style.
Michael Maclagan, Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at
Trinity College,
herald, and
Lord Mayor of Oxford 1970–71, lived for many years at No. 20, Tolkien's former home. The diplomat Sir
Julian Bullard (1928–2006) lived in Northmoor Road during his retirement. Three
Nobel Prizewinners are associated with Northmoor Road. The eminent Austrian
quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger and his wife Anny lived there from 1933 to 1936. Schrödinger previously held a Professorship at the
Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. He was not Jewish but was alarmed by the rise of anti-Semitism and accepted the offer of a Fellowship at Magdalen College Oxford to escape from Nazi Germany. Initially, they stayed at No. 12 Northmoor Road, and it was there that Schrödinger learned that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with
Paul Dirac from
Cambridge. Early in 1934 the Schrödingers moved into No. 24, two doors from the Tolkiens, where they lived until Schrödinger left in 1936 to take up a Professorship at the
University of Graz, Austria. In 1935, while he was living at No 24, Schrödinger wrote his famous "
Schrödinger's cat" paper, criticising the
Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which proposed that the exact state of a single atom was indeterminate until observed. Schrödinger's
thought experiment imagined a cat in a steel box, together with a small sample of some radioactive material in which there was a 50% chance that, in any hour, one atom would decay and emit radioactivity. Any release of radioactivity, detected by a Geiger counter, would trigger a device that would cause a hammer to shatter a glass vial containing prussic acid, hence killing the cat. Schrödinger argued that, according to the Copenhagen Interpretation, the cat would be both alive and dead until someone opened the box after an hour to take a look. Schrödinger's popular science book
What is Life? influenced
Francis Crick and
James Watson, winners of the
Nobel Prize for discovery of the structure of
DNA, both of whom are also linked with Northmoor Road. Watson and his wife Liz owned an apartment at No. 19 for some time after he held the Newton-Abraham Visiting Professorship at
Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1994. ==See also==