You are viewing an archived article.

MORGAN, WILLIAM (1750 - 1833), actuary

Born 26 May 1750 at Bridgend, Glamorganshire, brother of George Cadogan Morgan and nephew of the philosopher Richard Price. He was apprenticed to two apothecaries in London, and was a student at St. Thomas' Hospital. He returned to Bridgend in 1772 to take up his father's practice after his death. He went to London in 1773 where he may have kept a school for a while. In 17 April 1774 Price got him a place in the Equitable Assurance Society, where his progress was so rapid that from 1775 till his retirement in 1830 he was its chief actuary.

He valued the Equitable in 1775, the first office to be valued, and the Equitable in 1800 was the first office ever to add a bonus on payment made on a policy. In addition to his work with the Equitable he advised the Scottish Widows office when it was set up. It is likely that he was the first to produce X-rays when he passed electricity through an almost airless tube.

Like his uncle, he was a strong Radical, and his house on Stamford Hill was the resort of men like Horne Tooke and Tom Paine and Francis Burdett. He died 4 May 1833, and was buried at Hornsey.

Morgan is regarded as one of the pioneers of scientific life-insurance. He published tables and important articles on the principles of life-insurance, and it was on his tables that another Welsh actuary, Griffith Davies founded his own. Morgan received the gold medal of the Royal Society in 1783, and was F.R.S. Like his uncle, he strongly opposed the swelling of the national debt, and he published six pamphlets on that matter. He edited Richard Price's works, with a biography.

His son Arthur was an actuary at the Equitable from 1830 to 1870 and was an F.R.S. Another son, William, who died young was an assistant actuary briefly and a grandson, William, was an assistant actuary from 1870 to 1892.

Authors

• Emeritus Professor Robert Thomas Jenkins, (1881 - 1969)
• Dr Llewelyn Gwyn Chambers

Sources

• Caroline E. Williams (ed.), A Welsh family from the beginning of the 18th century (London 1885)
• D. Lleufer Thomas in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
• Peter H. Thomas in The Glamorgan Historian (1963), 89
• Maurice Edward Ogborn, Equitable Assurances, The story of life assurance in the experience of the Equitable Life Assurance Society, 1762-1962 (London 1962)
• Sir Herbert Maxwell, Annals of the Scottish Widows Fund Life Assurance Society during One Hundred Years, 1815-1914 (Edinburgh 1914), 34
• William Morgan, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (abridged), 15 (1781-1785), 699
• J. G. Anderson, The birth-place and genesis of Life Assurance, and other essays (London 1940), 43
• The Insurance Cyclopaedia being a Dictionary of terms used in connexion with the theory and practice of insurance …(1973), ii, 630

Further Reading

• Wikipedia Article: William Morgan

Additional Links

• VIAF: 102328114
• Wikidata: Q8015809

Published date: 1959

Article Copyright: http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/