George Finch may have revelled in the wilderness extremes of mountain climbing – sleeping under rough blankets in straw bunks, washing in tepid water from a tin basin, eating tinned peaches and drinking tea made from melted snow – but at home he was a man of comfort and refined tastes, invariably clad in a three-piece suit and watch chain, appreciative of fine red wine and a stickler for the formality of a sit-down meal with the family or friends.
As the family grew, they would move from their Kensington flat to a house in the green fields of Osterley on the western fringes of the city, and later George and Bubbles would move to Upper Heyford, a village in Oxfordshire, where George would branch into experimental gardening, including an early form of hydroponics, in which the garden was organised on scientific lines, with potatoes grown on plastic sheets, and the industrial quantities of runner beans he harvested were preserved in huge jars lining the kitchen shelves.
Everest was a subject to which he responded sparingly, a little like a soldier recalling conflict he’d rather forget. Despite his disappointments there were no regrets. He believed he would have made the summit if Geoffrey Bruce hadn’t broken the glass valve, but it would not have been worth a man’s life for him to have continued alone. It would have been ridiculous to risk Bruce’s life and perhaps his own just to stand on top of a mountain. Some would read this as a pointed observation about Mallory, although, publicly at least, George would always remain diplomatic about his relationship with the man whose death only entrenched his iconic status.
Australia emerged in conversation on occasion, particularly in connection with George’s fascination with snakes. If a visitor discovered on a shelf in the reading room the glass jar that contained a viper he’d caught with his bare hands and pickled in alcohol, he would use it as the launching pad for tales of his boyhood in the bush. He was wistful about his horse-riding and shooting abilities, the latter of which he kept sharpened by competing with some success in events at the Bisley shooting range.
By the late 1920s he had also taken up racing cars at the famed Brooklands circuit in Surrey, the world’s first purpose-built race track and the venue where most of the land speed records were established early in the twentieth century. The girls would sit in the grandstand with their mother and watch their father spin around the concrete embankment in a ‘crawler’ he was always modifying in his backyard garage. It was a family joke that he was caught once driving at forty miles per hour along Park Lane. When he admitted the transgression to Bubbles she chided him for driving too slowly.
If Bunty was his chosen companion in the mountains, then Moseli was his frequent assistant in the workshop he created in an upstairs bedroom, helping her father with components that were too small for his large hands. In the workshop he built high-speed cameras, among other ingenious items, and undertook household repairs, once mending his own watch by making a new winder.
It was a place of wonder for a child. The room seemed Tardis-like, crammed full of salvaged items, building components and machinery, including lathes of various sizes that hummed quietly as George honed parts for his creations. It was the time when her father became most animated, Moseli remembers, talking excitedly about his latest highly complex experiments, all the while his tiny radio emitting its tinny sounds, which only seemed to add to the excitement of his work rather than be an impediment to his concentration.
And concentration is what set him apart from others.
The household revolved around their father, although Bubbles was hardly a subservient character; rather, she was the opinionated domestic powerhouse who doted on her husband and took delight and pride in managing affairs around him. It was far from an unequal relationship, as Bunty and Moseli remembered it, but that of two strong-willed and at times sharp characters, who found a balance that provided both with a sense of achievement. Bubbles adored climbing with her husband but barely tolerated the yachting trips. They went to a theatre in Oxford once a week and shared a love of music.
Inside his laboratory, however, George was in his own world.
33.
THE BEILBY LAYER
There would be some remarkable similarities between George Finch’s challenges as a mountaineer and his career as a scientist. Just as the so-called golden age of mountaineering had spanned the latter half of the nineteenth century, when men thought they had conquered and seen all that was worthwhile only for climbers like Finch and Mallory to aim higher, so too the study of physics was beginning to stall toward the end of the 1800s as scientists began to believe they had discovered almost all there was to know.
But that would change as the new century dawned, sub-atomic particles were discovered and a wild-haired German named Albert Einstein revealed his extraordinary theories about time and space, challenging not only what was known but also what might remain to be discovered. Like George Finch, Einstein was a student of the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zürich and had returned to teach at his alma mater in 1912, just as George was about to graduate as the university’s gold-medal-winning student.
The impact of Einstein’s theories, first made public in 1905, was explosive and provided a wave of excitement that would encourage men and a growing number of women to take up the challenge of scientific discovery in the discipline of physics. Over the next three decades there would be innovative work on electrons and atoms, neutrons and positrons, x-rays, radiation, photo-electrics, alloys, heat radiation and crystals.
Quantum physics would emerge in the early 1920s, paving the way for atomic energy, lasers and computer technology. Some physicists began theorising about flying a rocket to the moon, while others marvelled at the intricacies of light and sound and the manner in which electrons travelled in waves. Often physicists in different countries and institutions would be working from the same set of theories only to emerge with exciting twists that would set off a new round of exploration. Industry leapt on board and began funding research it hoped would lead to practical applications.
George Finch could not help but be inspired. This was a world that embraced the notion that there was more to do, a world unafraid that new discoveries might make previous theories obsolete. He would look back decades later and assess the moment he embarked on his voyage of scientific discovery, offering a thoughtful vignette of his outlook and into his character:
It is not for all men actively to practise a science and advance it. But its gifts are gratuitous and there is no one who need go in want of them, nor anyone who may scorn them wholly and call himself modern. For it speaks the universal language. Where it turns to gaze it puts a new dimension in the scene, deepening it with marvellous perspective. This science, this cool way of looking … into vast spaces carried away a mind that had been encouraged so far chiefly to institutional judgments and emotional understandings. It was all too easy to have opinions on books, music, architecture. But appreciation is an edge that dulls with repetition; emotion is inconstant. Science has no use for any of this; it requires instead a bracing impartiality.
George’s first job at the Imperial College as a ‘demonstrator’ had been to design and manage a course on explosives, and a decade later, encouraged by William Bone, he embarked on ambitious studies of ignition and gas combustion in electrical discharges, focusing first on thermionic emission, the heat-induced electric charge observed by the iconic American inventor Thomas Edison when he watched an electric charge pass from a heated filament to a metal plate inside a table lamp. In essence, George Finch was setting out to build a better light bulb.
Unlike his mountaineering days, when he hardly kept a note of his plans or of their execution, George would meticulously record all the details of his experiments from first principles, as if he were preparing a lecture for a room full of lay people who required an explanation of even the reasons for the inquiry. In April and May 1920, as his excitement grew over the potential to tackle Everest, he also laid the groundwork for his experiments in a 200-page handwritten dissertation on ‘the explosive pr
ocess’, detailing not only its importance in advancing industry in general, but emphasising the need to ensure the safety of workforces in industries like coal mining, in which deaths from explosions caused by the ignition of gas were all too frequent. Over the next five years he would produce dozens of papers on aspects of his research, each adding a layer of practical knowledge to an otherwise complex set of theories.
His interest in ignition would lead to studies of the reactions of gaseous mixtures and metal catalysts, the research taking him back to the work he did with Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch as a student in 1911, when he was involved in improving the process of synthesising ammonia with iron to produce fertiliser for commercial applications.
George’s research now centred not on iron but on the use of other metals, including platinum, gold and silver, as catalysts to speed up the reaction of carbon monoxide and oxygen to form carbon dioxide, a mixture that would become critical in later years in the development of fuel cells and micro electronics, and lead to the development of catalytic converters in cars to eliminate carbon monoxide from exhaust gases. The science of heterogeneous catalysis would be particularly important to industry because it explored and harnessed the use of chemical reactions between metal and gas to make the production of energy more efficient.
George also began to study the properties of the Beilby layer, named after the Scottish chemist Sir George Beilby, who discovered theoretically in the early years of the twentieth century that mechanical polishing of metals disturbed their molecular surface structure and created a new layer which behaved like a viscous liquid, ‘almost as if it had been melted and then smeared out like butter over the surface’, as George would describe the process.
This had particular relevance for the lubrication of machinery and internal wear and tear in combustion engines. George looked at aeroplane engines and the mechanics of cylinders to understand the differences between the effect of the layer on cast iron and aluminium and why running in an engine helped to prolong the life of its moving parts. It would be painstaking study, his research continuing for almost three decades, through World War II, and finishing only as he prepared to retire in the early 1950s.
At times his research would attract media attention, his work distilled into clever, easily digestible bites, explaining, for example, his discovery that ‘sapphires’ formed inside car engines, the tiny stones created by heat and clustered on piston heads where they caused engine wear. The sapphires were so small that they could only be seen through an electron microscope.
At other times the reports would be more complex and serious. In December 1933 the Imperial College announced George’s research into the Beilby layer. It was a significant industrial breakthrough because he had demonstrated what Beilby had deduced, one paper declared:
The surface of polished metal is ‘liquid’. This fact, established for the first time by a London professor, is likely to lead to important advances in the protection of iron and steel against corrosion, the manufacture of permanently stainless steel plating for motor cars and the use of lighter alloys in aircraft which will yet withstand the destructive action of rain and atmosphere.
George Finch was surrounded by and could hold his place among the best scientific minds of the modern world, perhaps best illustrated when he was invited by the Nobel Prize committee to be on the nomination panel for its physics prize. It helped to dull his anger at his treatment by Arthur Hinks and Hinks’s cohorts as the lure of Everest faded and his climbing was reduced to annual visits to Switzerland and Wales.
When a nineteen-year-old George Finch was told by Artur Schnabel that he was not quite good enough to be a concert pianist, he simply stopped playing. Although there was a piano in his house George rarely sat down to run his fingers across the keys, instead content instead to listen to his daughters learn to play and to read sheets of music as he sat by the window in his reading room.
He now faced the same conundrum with mountain climbing, his dream of standing on the roof of the world denied by vindictive bureaucracy. He would give brief consideration to the idea of pursuing his own expedition, backed perhaps by American money, but the death of Mallory and clumsy diplomatic manoeuvres of the 1924 expedition, including instances of expedition members hunting animals against Buddhist law, put paid to that notion, and Everest disappeared as a target for almost a decade.
But climbing would not disappear entirely from George Finch’s life. The intellectual pursuit of science was now his focus but he found that, unlike his dismissal of the piano, he could not simply prop his icepick in a corner of his tool shed, hang up his eiderdown jacket in an overlooked wardrobe of the guest bedroom and forget the exhilaration of an icy climb under moonlight, nor the peace of a breakfast of tinned peaches and condensed milk washed down with lukewarm tea.
It might have been different if Bubbles had not taken so enthusiastically to the sport, now wielding a pick with her name embossed on the head as they spent their Easters in Wales and month in Europe, usually based in Zürich at the Neptune Hotel and climbing around Zermatt and Chamonix.
George now carried not only a pocket camera but a 35mm film camera strapped to his back with the idea of making films on climbing techniques. He had been encouraged by the response to his memoir, The Making of a Mountaineer, which he’d published in 1924 and which diplomatically skirted details of his Everest triumph to concentrate instead on a combination of stories and instructions to encourage young climbers. In his preface he wrote: ‘It is primarily for the members of the younger generation that this book has been written, in the hopes that by affording them a glimpse of the adventurous joys to be found in the mountains they may be encouraged to take up and try for themselves the pursuit of mountaineering.’
A second book, The Struggle for Everest, would be published only in German in 1925 because of the continued harassment and legal threats by Arthur Hinks. It would be another eighty-three years before the short book was printed in English.
True to his desire to encourage young climbers, by the mid 1920s George had begun a mountaineering club for Imperial College students, initially organising climbing trips in the Snowdonia region but eventually venturing to the Alps during the summer and including in the parties members of the Oxford University student club with which George Mallory had made his first climb.
In the summer of 1931 George took ten climbers with him to Europe, including Raymond Peto, whom he had introduced to climbing in 1923. The pair had become close friends since the younger man had completed his studies and he was now on leave from his position as a chemist at the Wellcome Trust’s tropical disease research laboratory in Sudan.
The group had spent two weeks in the Gotthard Massif and Bernese Oberland in central Switzerland, tackling progressively more difficult ascents in the lead-up to their main target, the Jungfrau, which George and Max had first climbed in 1909. The weather had been mostly good, but had become unpredictable in the middle of the month, with periods of pleasant summer heat interrupted by several days of cold.
The changing conditions had made George wary of the potential for some of the icier slopes to have destabilised by the time they tackled the formidable mountain on August 19. All went well on the ascent, the group roped in four parties behind George. They reached the summit around midday, after more than five hours climbing, with plenty of time to rest and take in their splendid surroundings.
George took the lead again on the descent, while Peto, as the next most experienced climber, brought up the rear with two of his friends from university days, Robert Kershaw and William Downey. George led the party back via a rocky rib, which angled down to a safe rendezvous point called the Rottalsattel. It was a longer route than they could have taken, and required step-cutting, but George was worried about the snow conditions on an easier slope which he considered unstable because of the weather.
By mid afternoon George’s group had made it to the rendezvous point, as had the two groups immediately behind who had followed in his footst
eps, but there was no sign of Peto, Kershaw and Downey. The trio appeared soon afterwards, not on the route George had carefully carved. They were attempting to traverse the slope he had specifically warned them to avoid. Years of experience told him they were a step away from disaster, the snow thin and prone to collapse in the afternoon sunshine. Why had Peto made the decision, he wondered.
The men were too far away to hear his warning shouts and too focused on their task to see his urgent waving. All George could do was watch and pray as they inched their way toward the safer part of the mountainside, all the time edging closer to a precipice which fell away more than 1600 feet to the base of the mountain.
Then it happened; one of the men slipped. George was not sure who it was but the misstep pulled the other two off their feet and in seconds they were sliding uncontrollably toward the cliff edge. There was no sound, no screams of terror, as the men tried in vain to anchor their axes in the slope and stop their headlong slide as they disappeared from view. They were gone.
George Finch, shattered psychologically and blaming himself, led the search with four guides the next day. An avalanche had followed the men over the cliff and a second had fallen overnight. It was dangerous to search but George could not bear to leave the bodies of his friends behind. He placed one of the guides as a lookout for further avalanches while he and the others scoured the area at the base of the great cliff, using long poles to feel deep into the fresh snow. It took more than six hours, in between dashes for cover as a fresh avalanche fell from above, to find and dig out the three bodies.
The Brilliant Outsider Page 31