The term cavitation first appeared in 1895 in a paper by John Isaac Thornycroft (1843–1928) and Sydney Walker Barnaby (1855–1925)—son of Sir Nathaniel Barnaby (1829 – 1915), who had been Chief Constructor of the Royal Navy—to whom it had been suggested by the British engineer Robert Edmund Froude (1846–1924), third son of the English hydrodynamicist William Froude (1810–1879). Early experimental studies of cavitation were conducted in 1894-5 by Thornycroft and Barnaby and by the Anglo-Irish engineer Charles Algernon Parsons (1854-1931), who constructed a stroboscopic apparatus to study the phenomenon. Thornycroft and Barnaby were the first researchers to observe cavitation on the back sides of propeller blades.