William Morgan (scientist)

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William Morgan (June 1750 – May 4, 1833) was a Welsh physician.

He was born in Bridgend, Glamorganshire, and first came to London for medical training at Guy's Hospital. He was appointed Assistant Actuary of The Equitable Life Assurance Society in 1774 and elected Actuary the next year, after the untimely death of John Pocock. By the time he retired in 1830, 56 years later at the age of 80, he laid the foundations of the actuarial profession —in fact the term "actuarial" became attached to the profession because of his title.

He won the Copley Medal in 1789 for his two papers on the values of Reversions and Survivorships, printed in the last two volumes of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, in the field of actuarial science:

On the Probabilities of Survivorships Between Two Persons of Any Given Ages, and the Method of Determining the Values of Reversions Depending on those Survivorships, 1788–1794
On the Method of Determining, from the Real Probabilities of Life, the Value of a Contingent Reversion in Which Three Lives are Involved in the Survivorship. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 79 (1789) pp. 40-54

Advised by Joseph Priestly, a family friend, he developed an interest in scientific experimentation and is 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".^[1]

Other publications:

The Doctrine of Annuities and Assurances on Lives and Survivorships, 1779
Computation of Premiums for Life Assurance on the Basis of the Northampton Table of Mortality, manuscript
Valuation (Individually) of the Assurance Contracts in Force in 1786, manuscript
Yearly Computation of Expected Deaths and Accounts Showing the State of the Equitable Life Assurance Society According to the Plan Suggested by Ricahrd Price, manuscript
Nine Addresses to the General Court of the Equitable Society Covering the Years 1793 to 1830, 1833