A Famous Armenian Could Have Become Prominent In Quite A Different Way

From the 1974 edition of Arthur Clarke’s “Voice Across the Sea”:

Around 1885 Thomson^† met and befriended a brilliant young Armenian engineering student, who decided that he too would become a professor of physics. But the young man’s father would not hear of this nonsense, and packed the boy off to the Middle East as soon as he had graduated. How different, one wonders, would modern history have been had Calouste Gulbenkian applied his extraordinary talents to science instead of using them to corner the world’s oil?

^† William Thomson, seven years later to be ennobled as 1st Baron Kelvin

A quick Google search didn’t reveal any direct confirmation of such a link between the great British scientist of the 19th century and the Armenian oil tycoon and prominent philanthropist of the 20th. This piece of information was also not present in the Russian translation (of the 1st edition of that book), which I read back in 2014 (thanks to an article on Habr).

P.S. I am now reading the English original (and re-reading the Russian translation in parallel) as a follow-up to the brief biography of Samuel Morse. After encountering a reference to Oliver Heaviside in the Introduction, it started feeling like I was on the path of discovering the source of (and the answer to) the question I have now had for a few years. While writing this post, I decided that the potential resolution of the said question should no longer be deferred, and skimmed through the chapter devoted to Heaviside. However, it turned out that nothing of the kind is found in (at least that part of) Arthur Clarke’s book. That is, in a sense, a relief, since otherwise it would mean that my memory was failing me with respect to the time of me having learned that anecdote.