The Trotter Paterson Lecture was created in 1951 as a biennial event to commemorate two distinguished past Presidents of the Illuminating Engineering Society, Alexander Trotter (President 1917-1920) and Sir Clifford Paterson (1928).
Both were founding members of the SLL in 1909 when Paterson was in charge of the Electrotechnical and Photometrical Department of the National Physical Laboratory and Trotter was electrical adviser to the Board of Trade.
Trotter was the pioneer of illuminating engineering and is credited with starting illuminating engineering as we understand it today with his paper The Distribution and Measurement of Illumination, read at the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1892. He retired in 1920.
The International Photometric Commission, founded in 1900, was reconstituted in 1913 as the International Commission on Illumination (CIE). Paterson was appointed honorary secretary of the new body, a post he held with only one break until 1948. The break was the period for which he was President from 1928 to 1931 and culminated with the CIE Congress held in Great Britain when floodlighting was demonstrated on a scale never before attempted.