  I first discuss the main motivations for Tony Skyrme's highly original
program (1958-62) of making fermionic nucleons out of bosonic pion fields, as
described in his Cosener's House talk in 1984. These include a dislike of
point-like elementary particles, which he blamed for infinite renormalization,
and a preference for extended objects distinguished by what we would now call
topological quantum numbers. In this he was strongly influenced by William
Thomson (Lord Kelvin), who was so impressed by Helmholtz's proof of the
conservation of circulation ("Wirbelbewegung") in fluid vortices that he
developed an entire theory of atoms as knotted vortices in the ether fluid.
Skyrme liked mechanical models, as did Kelvin, and he grew up fascinated by the
ingenuity of Kelvin's machine for predicting tides, an example of which stood
in his grandfather's house. This seems to have been connected to his strong
preference for bosonic fields, which have a classical limit, over fermionic
fields which do not. I then sketch the progress of Skyrme's ideas in the series
of six papers in the years 1958-62, which passed largely unnoticed at the time.
I emphasize his remarkable intuition that the kink solution of the classical
Sine-Gordon equation would be a fermion when quantized, and the novelty of his
identification of the Skyrmion winding number with baryon number in the
three-dimensional case. I end by briefly describing how Skyrme's work was
dramatically related to QCD in 1983-4.
