Chapter 7
Lenard in Stockholm
“Your Majesty, Your Royal Highness, Ladies and Gentlemen,” announced Professor A. Lindstedt. “The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to give this year’s Nobel Prize for physics to Dr. Philipp Lenard, Professor at the University of Kiel, for his important work on cathode rays.” Lenard stood beside Lindstedt. At the mention of his name, he bent slightly at the waist and favored the audience with a thin, tight-lipped smile.
The presentation of the Nobel Prizes on this dark, cold evening of December 10, 1905, had filled every seat of the main concert hall of Stockholm’s Academy of Music. Sweden’s King Oscar II and his Queen, Sophia of Nassau, sat behind Lindstedt and Lenard on the stage, seemingly intent on the distinguished scientist’s every pronouncement. King Oscar was a patron of science and culture, and was himself an amateur writer and musician. He had taken a very personal interest in the Nobel ceremonies since they’d begun five years earlier, when Alfred Nobel’s heirs had finally exhausted the available legal obstructions to exercising the dictates of the great man’s will.
Having invented dynamite and holding three hundred fifty-five other patents at the time of his death in 1896, Nobel had been a very wealthy man. His last will, signed the previous year at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris, left the majority of his fortune—roughly 31.6 million Swedish kronor (equivalent to about USD $255 million in 2013)—for the establishment of a fund. The interest from the fund was to be used to award significant monetary prizes that Nobel hoped would both incentivize important work and recognize the achievements of men and women that “shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.” More specifically, Nobel’s will stipulated that the interest accrued from his bequest, each year, be divided among persons “who shall have made the most important discovery or invention” within the fields of physics, chemistry, and medicine or physiology; “who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”; and who had most contributed to activities intended to promote peace among nations.
Lindstedt continued with his introduction of Lenard,
The discovery of the cathode rays forms the first link in the chain of brilliant discoveries with which the names of Roentgen, Becquerel, and Curie are connected. The discovery itself was made by Hittorf as long ago as 1869 and therefore falls in a period before that which the Nobel Foundation is able to take into account. However, the recognition which Lenard has earned himself by the further development of Hittorf’s discovery (which is becoming of increasing importance) shows that he too deserves the same reward as has already come to several of his successors for work of a similar nature.
Lindstedt laid out the background of experimentation that preceded and influenced Lenard’s work, then ticked off the principal contributions that had brought Lenard to the exalted state of Nobel Prize honoree. Perhaps foremost, Lenard had, in a sense, reinvented the cathode ray tube and made its use more efficient by replacing the glass at the cathode end of the tube with a thin aluminum plate. The plate allowed the rays to pass through so that “it became possible to study cathode rays under much simpler and more convenient experimental conditions than before.” He found no differences in the rays within the tube versus those that had passed through the aluminum window. Moreover, the cathode rays “proved to be carriers of negative electricity even in empty space, and they could be deflected from their path by both magnetic and electrical fields.” Finally, Lenard found differences among the cathode rays based on the extent to which they were generated in a vacuum and could be deflected by a magnet.
In wrapping up, Lindstedt projected the future importance of Lenard’s discoveries. His research raised questions about how cathode rays were propagated. Were they supported by an ether, as Lenard proposed? Or perhaps, as the Englishman Crookes had suggested, the rays were comprised of electrons moving at very high speeds. “It is clear,” Lindstedt concluded, “that Lenard’s work on cathode rays has not only enriched our knowledge of these phenomena, but has also served in many respects as a basis for the development of the electron theory. Lenard’s discovery that cathode rays can exist outside the discharge tube, in particular, has opened up new fields of research in physics.”
As Lindstedt completed his remarks, he turned to Lenard, shook his hand, and spoke a few personal congratulatory words. The Swede crossed the stage to hand King Oscar the ornate certificate and gold medal symbolizing the award, and the King, in turn, presented them to Lenard. Lenard smiled broadly to receive the applause of the crowd.
As he returned to his seat, he thought he should feel more exhilarated, but it was all over so quickly, his moment in the sun. The papers would carry the story of the ceremony in the morning, but nothing would really change for him. A few days hence, the general public will already have forgotten the name Lenard. Still, how many men in their lifetime received such an honor? And there was the prize money to consider—one hundred-thirty eight thousand Swedish kronor—which, with the expense of having a family, was sorely needed. He forced a smile, but it didn’t feel quite right. In all fairness, he really should have received the very first Nobel Prize, the one Roentgen had stolen from him in 1901. At the very least, he had deserved to share it with Roentgen.
Lenard had heard what he knew to be more than a rumor. The committee responsible for vetting the nominations for the physics prize had recommended that he and Roentgen share the 1901 award, but the committee had been voted down by the main assembly on a technicality. A faction of the assembly had argued that, at least for the first prize, there should be only a single honoree. Roentgen might have stepped forward and voiced his support for Lenard; he’d had every opportunity to give the proper credit. Instead, Roentgen had been greedy and showed his true colors. He had been so wrapped up in the public acclaim for his discovery that he’d forgotten it was purely an accident. No one would ever have heard of Roentgen except that Lenard’s work had led him by his nose to the obvious. Apparently, rightfully sharing the responsibility for the discovery of X-rays never occurred to him. Worse. Perhaps it did.
He felt a small thrill of pride over the Nobel Prizes awarded to his countrymen who followed him onto the stage—Adolf von Baeyer for his work in organic chemistry and Robert Koch, who received the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for his research into the pathogenesis of tuberculosis. Germans had swept the prizes in the sciences, the only ones that mattered.
A Pole had won the Prize for literature. Lenard looked again at his program to remind himself of the man’s name. Henryk Sienkiewicz. The presenter, this time a man introduced as the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, had prattled on inanely about what really was nothing more than inconsequential scribbling. The way the presenter was gushing over the new laureate was embarrassing: “in every nation there are some rare geniuses who concentrate in themselves the spirit of the nation.” Rubbish! And then, “Their inspiration is deeply rooted in the past, like the oak tree of Baublis in the desert of Lithuania.” What effete babble! He had known since childhood that mathematics and the natural sciences were all that really mattered. He had written that these subjects were the “oases within the desert. . . . All the getting up at four in the morning and going to bed at midnight was of no use—history and geography did not enter my head.”
There had been more speeches that night, but Lenard hardly paid them any attention. It was amazing, the unexpected twists that had brought him to such grand heights. His father had wanted him to take over the family wine business. Lenard had hated the very idea of it. There had been quite a few arguments over his resistance. To appease the old man, he’d given it a try after his initial scientific training. He’d read some biographies of famous scientists whose investigations were sidelights to other careers. Perhaps he could emulate them. In the end, he couldn’t do it. Working in a business had been beneath him, so bourgeois, so Jewish. Jews were said to be good at business. He wasn’t so sure. His father’s partner had been a Je
w, a man named Leban, but still the business had failed.
Science had been his first and only love. As a boy, he had routinely saved some of the small allowance his parents gave him. When he had saved enough, he wandered down to the Krapp brothers’ bookshop at the edge of Pressburg’s Jewish quarter and spent his money on whatever science book caught his attention. It was an awful shame when the store went under. He’d gone to Steiner’s after that. By then, his interest in science was in full flight. He had built a chemistry laboratory in his parents’ garden and conducted experiments. Years later, when he was in high school, his teacher, Virgil Klatt, had taken him under his wing. During school and even on holidays, they had performed hundreds of experiments together, reproducing Becquerel’s work with phosphorescent stones.
He’d tried to take his doctoral degree at the University of Budapest but wasn’t admitted. Bunsen accepted him at Heidelberg, where he received his degree with high honors in 1886. By then, he’d already established a reputation as a man who bore watching. Still, it hadn’t been easy finding a permanent position until Kiel had taken a chance on him. He’d spent a year or two in each of a number of temporary positions—Berlin with Helmholtz, then Budapest, Aachen, and Breslau, before his temporary appointment at Heidelberg in 1896. By this point in his career, he’d already been credited with what was called the “waterfall effect” by some and the “Lenard effect” by others. He had to admit that the latter had a nice ring to it. His experiments had revealed the separation of positive and negative electrical charges as water droplets broke up while falling through the atmosphere, and described the differing shapes of water droplets depending on their size.
He’d begun his work with cathode ray tubes when he was with Helmholtz, in Berlin, during 1888. His invention of the “Lenard window,” while he was still in his twenties, had made his career. The window was simply an opening in the cathode end of the glass tube covered by a thin aluminum foil that allowed better egress of the cathode rays outside the tube for improved study. It was only a short step from this point to his discovery of the photoelectric effect. He’d found that the interaction of ultraviolet light and a metal plate caused the release of energy according to the frequency of the light. The result surprised him, as he had expected there to be a much stronger correlation with the intensity of the light; the exact nature of the relationship remained obscure. Had he heard that there was a young man in Zurich who had worked on this exact problem? It seemed to him that he had.
His path to success had been a long road with many false turns and disappointments, but he had persevered. The universities that had not kept him on the faculty, that had encouraged him to try elsewhere, had made a grave mistake. The Nobel Prize was proof of that.
Lenard was roused from his thoughts by people standing and moving around him. The presentation ceremony was over. Lindstedt was hovering, greeting the sycophants wishing to have a word with him as though he had been the one awarded the prize. He saw in the distance the royals, Oscar and Sophia, leaving with their retinue for the banquet. The crowd trailed, looking wolfish, as though they had not eaten in days.
Lenard followed the crowd outside to the dining room of a nearby hotel and found his assigned place among the hundreds of dinner guests. Despite his mood, he couldn’t help but marvel at the surrounding finery. The women wore long gowns of every imaginable color and design, many purchased at the best Parisian shops. Adding to their elegance, they had donned their finest wool and fur stoles, white gloves that ascended their arms to their elbows and beyond, and glittering gems retrieved earlier that day from household vaults and secret hiding places scattered among the best neighborhoods in Stockholm.
In contrast, the men were nearly uniformly attired, each wearing, as he was, a long-tailed, black cutaway jacket paired with matching slacks featuring black cords up the outside of the legs, a stiff white shirt with a white wing collar, and either white or silver cuff links and shirt studs. The more rakish sported a white pocket square conservatively extruding just the slightest amount from their left breast pocket.
Lenard seated himself and greeted the guests beside and across from him. The ballroom was dazzling. Long rectangular tables were lined up end to end in long, straight rows and covered with expensive linens. Arrangements of exotic flowers, imported from warmer climes, soared upward at regular intervals. Each guest’s place had been set with fine china, an array of silverware, organized from the periphery inward to receive each course in order, and a selection of leaded Orrefors crystal, gleaming in candlelight. Less than a decade old, the company had designed special glassware to commemorate the event. Each style was specifically shaped to maximize the enjoyment of the wine that would accompany each serving.
Suddenly, from the kitchen, came a burst of activity. Gaggles of waiters, dressed in dinner jackets and carrying decorative bowls of beef consommé, circled behind the diners to reach over their left shoulders and deposit their burdens. The same choreography brought forth, at intervals, a sequence of filet of sole, saddle of lamb, hot and cold partridge, and hearts of artichoke, followed by ice cream, pastry and fruit. Each course was paired with a carefully selected wine—Golden Sherry, Chateau Doutor, a Hochheimer white wine, champagne by Mumm, Romanee from Burgundy, Apollonaris with dessert, and Sandeman port with cigars. The remarkable display of excess emphasized the day’s theme: these were extraordinary men who had earned this evening’s special culinary tribute.
Lord knows, he had done the work—and then he had waited. Only a very select group of scientists had the right to make Nobel nominations: members of the Nobel physics committee or of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences; past Nobel laureates; professors of physics in Scandinavian countries; and holders of chairs in a selected cadre of Scandinavian institutions. Lenard’s name had been bruited around the assembly as a candidate from the start. In 1901, all five members of the physics committee had suggested both his name and Roentgen’s. He had received additional support from the British physicist and mathematician Sylvanus Thompson, a foreign member of the Swedish Academy, but it had not been enough to carry the day. For the next four years, a man who would become his collaborator in his quest to prove the existence of ether, Vilhelm Bjerknes, nominated him for the prize. In 1904, two other scientists—Wiener and Hallwachs—had placed his name in nomination, although they both proffered additional nominations at the same time.
This year, it had been Bjerknes again, but also Jacobus van’t Hoff, the Dutch professor who had won the very first prize for chemistry. It must have been van’t Hoff who had done the trick. It galled Lenard that it had taken so long for the Nobel committee to recognize him. Professor Lindstedt had unwittingly made the case in his introduction, saying Lenard was responsible for providing the foundation from which Roentgen’s and the Curies’ research had sprung. His work had come first; he had led the way. Then he had looked on from the sidelines as each of those who had followed and benefited from his discoveries had been selected before him. Yet, despite Lenard’s work lying at the root of so much of modern physics, there had been no mass acclaim for him as there had been for Roentgen, and for Becquerel and the Curies too, for that matter.
What initially had been an almost inconsequential slight had inadvertently been imprinted on his consciousness by Professor Lindstedt. Now, he could not let it go. That the others had prospered by feeding off his ideas rankled to such an extent that by May 28 of the following year, when Lenard returned to Stockholm to deliver the traditional Nobel Lecture, “On Cathode Rays,” he was ready to set the record straight. He had stood by and watched Roentgen take the credit for what was rightfully his for long enough.
“I shall now speak not only of the fruits but also of the trees which have borne them, and of those who planted these trees,” Lenard began. “This approach is the more suitable in my case, as I have by no means always been numbered among those who pluck the fruit; I have been repeatedly only one of those who planted or cared for the trees, or who helped to do this.”
Lenard’s tube employed platinum as the cathode target, which he claimed was the material that produced the greatest number of X-rays. Between the efficiency of the platinum plate and his tube design, which allowed the X-rays generated by the high-energy electrons striking the plate to freely exit the tube, he dismissively concluded, “The discovery soon after this of X-rays by Roentgen, the first investigator to use the type of tube described above, is generally considered to be a good example of a lucky discovery. But, given the tube, the fact that the attention of the observer was already turned from the interior to the outside of the tube, and the presence of phosphorescent screens outside the tube, because of the purpose of the tube, it appeared to me that this discovery had of necessity to be made at this stage of development.” In plain language, Lenard was claiming that it was his work had led Roentgen to his discovery. Any fool could have done it. It just so happened that Roentgen was the fool who did.
This indictment of Roentgen as merely “lucky” and beholden to Lenard for his good fortune was a typical one for Lenard. In time, Lenard would come to have similar complaints about Einstein and his law of the photoelectric effect. Ironically, in 1905, the same year that Lenard sat on the Nobel stage, the scientific world would read Albert Einstein’s article in Annalen der Physik on the law of the photoelectric effect. It had been Lenard who had first written about the curious effect several years earlier, but he had not been able to elucidate the physical laws that governed it. Using the constant derived by Max Planck, it was left to Einstein to bring forth the relationship between the wavelength, or frequency, of ultraviolet light striking a metal plate and the kinetic energy of the electrons released as a result.
The Man Who Stalked Einstein Page 10