[1][2] Educated as a chemist and having worked as a physicist, Paget held a deep interest in various fields of science.
Pamela's nephew and Sir Richard's grandson, Alexander Chancellor, wrote in his "Long Life" column in The Spectator that Pamela had broken her arm when Sir Richard encouraged her to throw herself backwards from the open platform of a London bus on Park Lane to demonstrate his theory that, due to air currents, one could fall horizontally from a bus travelling at a certain speed and land safely on the road.
[4][5] According to Lady Glenconner's obituary in The Telegraph, Sir Richard had also filled his daughters' ears with treacle (to simulate deafness) while testing his sign language system.
While he made contributions to several branches of the field from phonetics and vocalisation to linguistics and vocabulary, it was his theories on the origin of speech and the "pantomimic action" of the lips and tongue being related to the speaker's senses and emotions that led to his central thesis that hand signs and gestures were the original form of human communication, and that humans had evolved to communicate vocally as their "hands [were] full".
[6] His book on these ideas, Human Speech, was published in 1930, and was re-issued in 1964 due to its connections with later developments in communication engineering.