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When Harold Palmer (1877 – 1949) first began as a teacher of English as a foreign language in 1902 at a language school in Verviers, Belgium run on Berlitz lines, the main attraction of the job was that it allowed him to live abroad in a French-speaking country. In all likelihood he would eventually come back home in a few years and “settle down”, like many others before and since. Palmer, however, stayed on, opened his own school, and began to think seriously about the work he was doing and how it could be improved. When he died forty-seven years later, English language teaching was well on its way to a professionhood which he, more than any other single individual, had helped to bring about.
Palmer was hired by the Berlitz corporation in Belgium.