Lyons, Henry George

Epithet: Colonel Director and Sec Science Museum

Henry George Lyons was born on 11 October 1864 in London. He was educated at Wellington College, and in 1882 entered the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich. In 1884, he attended a two-year course of military engineering at Chatham, after which he was posted to Gibraltar and then to Egypt, where he studied geology in his spare time. In 1901, Lyons retired from the army and was appointed director of the geological survey in Egypt, a post he held until 1909 when he returned to Britain. During the First World War, Lyons served with the Royal Engineers, retiring with the rank of colonel in 1919, and in the same year was appointed secretary-general of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics. In 1920, he became director of the Science Museum in London, where he remained until his retirement in 1933. He was knighted in 1926 and died on 10 August 1944 at Great Missenden.

Henry A. Lyons (ca. 1809-1872) was a lawyer of St. Francisville, La., and associate justice (December 1849-March 1852) and the second chief justice (January-March 1852) of the Supreme Court of California. He was the third husband of Eliza Pirrie Bowman, the owner of Oakley Plantation in West Feliciana Parish, La.