*
Lindemann’s audience at Mulberry House had witnessed his most appealing trait: the unswerving loyalty he showed to his friends. He had also demonstrated his skill in the underrated art of rendering a jumble of scientific ideas, statistics and opinion into a lucid conspectus. If, however, the conversation that evening ventured into territory outside science – as it probably did – the audience may also have been given a taste of his philistinism. ‘He had stone-blind spots outside his own territory,’ in the opinion of Churchill’s friend Violet Bonham Carter, who later recalled Lindemann’s sniffing at a portrait by Rembrandt or Velázquez, commenting that such pictures were a waste of money – much better likenesses were achieved with a camera.13 On another occasion, he chided a friend for revering a poet who, Lindemann said, was merely a ‘feller [who] writes quite decent verses’.14
Lindemann had arrived in Oxford in 1919, a professor at the age of thirty-three, knowing that the university authorities wanted him to breathe new life into their moribund Clarendon Laboratory and put it on a par with the Cavendish.15 The university appeared to have found the ideal person to deliver its dream, as he had already proved himself a first-rate researcher and was held in high regard by the leading scientists of the day. In Berlin before the war, he had flourished at the court of Einstein. The Prof was an admired experimentalist and theoretician, working successfully on a wide range of topics, from the way matter behaves at ultra-low temperatures to astrophysics. He was no mean inventor, too, and took out several patents.16 As soon as the war broke out, he returned to England and, after applying unsuccessfully for a commission to fight, joined the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough, the UK’s principal centre of aviation research. There, he famously worked out the principles involved in getting aircraft out of a tailspin, and courageously showed that his ideas were correct by taking the controls of a demonstration flight.17
Lindemann seized the opportunity Oxford had given him, reinvigorating its physics department and winning resources for new staff, equipment and buildings.18 In getting things done so quickly, however, he made more than his share of enemies, some from his attacks on the university’s bias towards the arts, some from his pungent sarcasm, some from a combination of the two. No sooner had he put down his roots as a leader of scientists than he had gone to seed, repeatedly demonstrating that he did not fully understand the revolutionary import of Einstein’s theory of relativity.19 It was not long before there were mutterings in the Common Rooms that he was not quite the scientist he had been cracked up to be.20
Lindemann had withdrawn from front-line research in physics, knowing he was never going to be able to compete with scientists of the calibre of Einstein and Rutherford. During a soirée at the house of the Fabian economists Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Lindemann was asked why he no longer did research, and replied candidly: ‘I can understand and criticise anything, but I have not got the creative power to do it myself.’ Deep down, he was aware that he was Salieri to Rutherford’s Mozart.21 Although he affected modesty when talking with his friends, they knew he believed himself to be nothing less than a great man, accepting that only a handful of others, including Einstein and Churchill, were above him.22 Although he was never going to be a great physicist, he could – if he played his cards right – use his knowledge as a scientist to inveigle his way into the highest echelons of the Conservative Party, and put his brilliance on display. As a result, he chose to spend much of his time and energy becoming one of Churchill’s most attentive courtiers, a choice that cost him some of his dignity but which certainly paid off.
On the day Lindemann gave his talk at Mulberry House, he read in The Times that Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany was almost complete.23 In a series of maniacal speeches, the Führer had continued to exploit widespread resentment over the terms forced on Germany by the Versailles Treaty and had whipped up anti-Semitism into a frenzy, now backed by the full resources of the State. Gangs of brown-shirted storm troopers were rampaging across Germany, intimidating, beating and sometimes murdering Jews and Communists.24 The report in The Times began: ‘During the past week the Nazi steam roller has passed over every one of the seventeen Federal States of the Reich and has left a Brown uniformity behind it.’
In Britain, Hitler was not yet perceived to be an international threat. Even Churchill was initially inclined to accept the Foreign Office’s view that the German leader was either a harmless lunatic or a gallant ex-corporal out to restore the morale of his country.25 Less than a month after the Mulberry House talk, however, Churchill told the Commons that, with an aggrieved Germany rapidly acquiring military parity with its neighbours, ‘We should see ourselves within a measurable distance of the renewal of general European war,’ words that then had no resonance.26 He worried, too, about the governance of India, a subject not likely to win him a significant popular base of national support.27 Out of tune with the times, he was now easily put off his stride in Parliament. One commentator thought Churchill’s oratory in the Commons was on the wane and that he was now like a ‘great romantic actor trying to become a heavy tragedian’.28
Lindemann had many Jewish friends and associates in the German physics community and he knew they were being harassed, beaten up or worse, and that many excellent Jewish scientists were soon likely to be thrown out of their jobs. The dam was about to burst: in January 1933, Germany was home for about 525,000 Jews, about half of whom would soon emigrate.29 Lindemann’s attitude to Jewry was contradictory: he was often gratuitously anti-Semitic but was appalled by Nazism and its treatment of Jewish scientists.30 Yet he was the first senior British scientist to help his displaced colleagues in Germany. He knew that if he could recruit some of the best of them, the academic standard and status of his department would rise sharply, so he sought funding from his old friend Harry McGowan, the dictatorial chairman of ICI, who readily agreed despite his company’s relatively poor financial health.
On 14 April 1933, when the first reports of the arrival in London of Jewish refugees were published, Lindemann was being chauffeured to Germany in his Rolls-Royce, sometimes taking a nap in the bed installed in the rear compartment.31 That Easter, he spent several days meeting with Jewish scientists and offered some of them an opportunity to move to England by taking up the temporary posts he had established in his laboratory.32 The result was an influx of top-quality talent into Oxford University’s physics department – Lindemann had seized an opportunity to do good, and to do well.
Six weeks after Lindemann’s trip to Berlin, British academics began to set up an organisation to help the growing number of refugees from German universities and other scholarly institutions. The prime mover was William Beveridge, director of the London School of Economics, who had recently seen something of the panic among persecuted Jewish academics in Germany. Within a few weeks, British newspapers published a letter announcing the formation of the Academic Assistance Council, with Rutherford as its president. The letter was signed by forty-one academics and leading public figures, including J. B. S. Haldane, the poet and classicist A. E. Housman, the physiologist A. V. Hill and the economist John Maynard Keynes.33 Lindemann was not among them. Behind the scenes, the Council hoped that the refugee crisis would be short-lived, so it awarded its first grants for only a year and on the condition that beneficiaries could not apply for permanent academic posts, which were assumed to be reserved for British applicants.34 This did not prevent the circulation of leaflets in Cambridge urging that university students should be taught only by Britons, not by ‘politically biased aliens’.35
Donors had contributed almost ten thousand pounds to the Council’s coffers by the end of July, but Lindemann attracted more for his private initiative, especially from his friends in ICI.36 The Council appears to have regarded Lindemann’s work as complementary to its own, although his policy of enticing the best scholars to Oxford by paying double the top grant given by the Council was bound to be divisive. Lindemann played the game skilfully: he promoted his own Oxfor
d-focused interests, while offering the Council’s broader project enough support to deflect charges of selfishness. To anyone of Rutherford’s shrewdness, however, Lindemann’s tactics were transparent.
One of the scientists the Prof assisted was Einstein. In early May 1933, Lindemann received a letter from Einstein, asking if ‘a small room’ in Christ Church could be made available for a short visit.37 He was writing from his ‘very pleasant exile’, billeted with his wife in a villa on the Belgian coast near Ostend, protected twenty-four hours a day by two armed guards. ‘I shall never see the land of my birth again,’ he predicted correctly. A few days later he wrote again, confirming Lindemann and Churchill’s view of what Hitler was up to: ‘I am reliably informed that [the Nazis] are collecting war material and in particular aeroplanes in a great hurry. If they are given another year or two the world will have another fine experience at the hands of the Germans.’38
Einstein had visited Britain in the previous two summers, co-hosted by Lindemann, and was planning another stay before taking up a permanent position in the US, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Before setting sail for the US, Einstein visited England at short notice, going to the House of Commons and meeting several politicians, including Churchill. The two men – each in exile in their own way – met at Chartwell for lunch on a stifling Saturday afternoon in late July, with Lindemann in attendance.39 Churchill wore no tie and sported a Stetson-like hat, while Einstein was draped in a suit of white linen that looked as if he had slept in it. A few hours after the meeting, Einstein wrote to his wife that Churchill ‘is an eminently wise man . . . It became clear to me that these people have taken precautions and will act resolutely and soon.’40 Perhaps Einstein had misunderstood his host’s influence, for Churchill was in no position to speak for his country.
Lindemann was one of Einstein’s hosts during his visits to Britain, enabling him to spend weeks in Christ Church, away from the clamour of the press. The Prof disliked publicity and wanted nothing to do with humanitarian appeals,41 so he played no part in an evening event organised by the Academic Assistance Council and other groups to highlight the need to support refugees. Einstein was the star attraction. On 3 October, he appeared with Rutherford on the stage of the Royal Albert Hall in front of ten thousand people. Rutherford gave him a messiah’s welcome, inviting him to address the crowd by thrusting out a comradely arm. The evening gave a boost to the coffers of the hard-pressed Council, which was straining to support the dozens of desperate refugees who were arriving every week. By the outbreak of the war, some two thousand academics had registered with the Council, most of them receiving financial aid.42
Four days after the Albert Hall event, Einstein set sail for America, never to return to Europe.43 Two months later, a week before Christmas, Einstein wrote to congratulate Lindemann on his ‘wonderful work for exiled scientists’.44
The sage of Princeton now seldom ventured outside his new hometown but did accept an invitation to speak in December 1934 at a meeting in Pittsburgh, where he talked about his equation E=mc2.45 Before the event, an interviewer asked him whether it would ever be possible to harness energy from atomic nuclei, as dozens of popular articles and books had speculated. Pointing out that he was not a scientific prophet, he made what amounted to a prophecy: ‘I feel absolutely sure, nearly sure, that it will not be possible . . . it will be like shooting birds in the dark, in a country where there are few birds.’ Quoting his opinion, the New York Times assured its readers that even if there were another terrible war, there was virtually no chance that either side would be able to use bombs of the type Wells had envisaged. Over in London, however, one scientist was telling anyone who would listen that Einstein was wrong – and that nuclear weapons were a distinct possibility.
SEPTEMBER 1933 TO FEBRUARY 1935
Szilárd’s nuclear epiphany
‘Even in 1925, Szilárd felt he was already someone important; so, he reasoned, all scientists would benefit from his acquaintance.’
EUGENE WIGNER, 19921
To tell Leó Szilárd that something cannot be done was to spur him on to a crisp refutation. He liked nothing better than to disprove dogmas and to shock everyone with his own boldness and ingenuity.2 In this way, he came to be the first to outline how nuclear energy might be harnessed, possibly to make bombs, and to warn that such weapons might soon be in the hands of tyrants. In the mid-1930s, he was obsessed with bringing the danger to the attention of the highest authorities in politics and science – a cosmopolitan pied piper, albeit one who struggled to attract followers.
One of Szilárd’s strengths was that he was extremely well connected – among his many friends and collaborators was Einstein. The two had met in Berlin in late 1920, when Szilárd was a twenty-two-year-old postgraduate student with prematurely receding hair and always in need of a comb.3 He was already in a hurry to make his mark in physics, having recently arrived in Berlin, fleeing the political upheavals and anti-Semitism of his native Hungary. Within a few months of the young man’s arrival at the city’s university, he walked up to the world’s most famous scientist and requested private tutorials for himself and a few colleagues. Einstein agreed. This was typical both of Einstein’s generosity and Szilárd’s directness – the young Hungarian’s self-confidence was always on display, like plumage.
Among Szilárd’s friends in Berlin were his fellow countrymen Eugene Wigner, a theoretical physicist, and the mathematician John von Neumann, fellow Jews educated in the same school district and destined to become leading lights in the American effort to build nuclear weapons. Of the three, Szilárd was not the brightest but was by far the most self-promoting, always teeming with imaginative ideas that he would press on everyone he deemed worthy of his attention.
The 1920s were Szilárd’s best years as a scientist. He proved himself as a physicist, hobnobbed with the subject’s royalty and made his name. Although his assertiveness sometimes bordered on impertinence, he could not be ignored. More quickly than many of his colleagues, Szilárd saw that Germany’s seething discontent with rampant inflation, rising unemployment and the Versailles Treaty was festering into a dangerous compound of militarism and xenophobia. Yet, as he studied H. G. Wells’s The Open Conspiracy, admiring its statement of the problems facing the world in the late 1920s, he believed that democracy might survive in Germany for a generation or two. Hitler soon disabused him and, by early 1933, life had become intolerable for him and his fellow Jews. The last straw was Goebbels’s crackdown in mid-March 1933 on the employment of Jewish academics – universities could now employ Jews only in the same proportion as their presence in the population, about one per cent. On the afternoon of 30 March, two weeks before Lindemann was chauffeured into Berlin, Szilárd packed two suitcases and left his lodgings. He headed for the railway station and took a train to Vienna, about to embark on his career as an itinerant nuclear ambassador.
Out of the blue in the early autumn of 1933, while crossing a London street, he hatched the idea for harnessing nuclear energy. At that time, he was living near the British Museum at the ostentatiously ornate Imperial Hotel, its redbrick frontage – complete with corbels and gargoyles – overlooking the small park on Russell Square.4 His savings, some of them generated by profits from patents, enabled him to live there for a few weeks. Such comfortable accommodation was well beyond the means of most newly arrived refugees, the majority of them almost destitute and forced to come to terms with an alien culture, a foreign language and the possibility that they would not see their homeland for years. Though proudly unsentimental, Szilárd was as homesick as any of them.
He had a desk at the nearby London School of Economics, where he worked for the Academic Assistance Council, which – at least in his own mind – he had conceived shortly after he left Germany, during a conversation in Vienna with William Beveridge.5 Szilárd was not the easiest of colleagues at the Council – he was never going to be a popular figure in the English establishment, its officials more accustomed
to cringing obeisance than to his brand of unflinching directness. Szilárd approached everyone in the same way, firing words at them like bullets.6
He followed international politics closely, reading The Times in the hotel lobby every morning, before returning to his room for a few hours’ soak in the bath. The reports from Germany painted a picture of violent racism and increasing brutality, fostered by Hitler, who for many people in Britain was still a richly comic figure, almost Chaplinesque, surely soon to be found out and pelted in the stocks with custard pies.7 Szilárd knew that life for many in Germany, especially Jews, was much worse than most people in Britain appreciated.
He planned to change his routine on Monday 11 September by travelling to ‘atom smashing day’ at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Leicester, where Rutherford and a few of his ‘boys’ were to talk. But that morning Szilárd woke up with a cold and decided to stay in bed. The next day, he read about the session in The Times, its long report featuring an eye-catching comment from Rutherford: ‘Anyone who looked for a source of power in the transformation of . . . atoms was talking moonshine.’8 Those words made the front page of the New York Times9 and ricocheted around the British press for days, with some reports giving the impression that Rutherford had pronounced the pursuit of nuclear energy to be futile.10 Szilárd immediately rose to the challenge. Perhaps Rutherford would soon be writhing in posterity’s elephant trap, with all the other mavens rash enough to pontificate on the future of science?
In the next few days, Szilárd thought about Rutherford’s remarks as he was walking around London. Crossing the busy thoroughfare in front of his hotel, he stopped for a traffic light and, just as it turned green, he had his epiphany:11
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