Sir James Woodham Menter, FRSFRMS (22 August 1921 – 18 July 2006) was a British physicist.
He was born in Teynham, Kent and was educated at the Dover Grammar School for Boys, where he won a scholarship to study Natural Sciences at Peterhouse, Cambridge. His studies were interrupted by the Second World War, during which he was engaged on trials of Under Water Sound Detection systems at the Admiralty Research Station in Fairlie, Ayrshire. He completed his degree in 1945 and did a PhD on the subject of the use of the electron microscope to examine the micro-topography of surfaces.[1]
In 1961 he went to work at the Tube Investments Research Laboratory at Hinxton Hall, Cambridgeshire. There he was able to acquire the latest and most powerful Electron Microscope then available, the Siemens Elmiscop 1, and soon demonstrated its potential to determine the atomic structure of crystalline solids by resolving the structure of platinum phthalocyanine. In 1965 he was appointed director of research and development at the establishment and in 1968 made a member of the main board of the company.
