George had witnessed death on a mountain before, his mind going back to the horrific plunge of the two Germans on one of his first climbs with Max, but this was different, and personal. Intellectually he knew the tragedy was not his fault, but it would be impossible to shake the sense of responsibility.
He would never climb again.
The idea that electrons move in waves had been proposed in the mid 1920s by the French physicist Louis de Broglie and was confirmed in 1927 by George Paget Thomson, a colleague of George Finch at the Imperial College, with whom he would work closely and who would later be awarded the Nobel Prize for his work.
George Finch preferred to talk in lectures and presentations about electrons behaving like fish, swimming uniformly in a school, but wriggling in desperation when removed from their environment. Waves, he explained, were akin to the audience being shown a series of photographs of mountain climbers in dangerous situations, prompting a range of responses from amazement to anxiety, dismay and relief.
George was in frequent communication with Thomson and by 1930 had shifted his research focus to electron diffraction – the movement patterns of electrons – in the hope that it would provide insight into surface structures and how metals bonded together. What he needed was a machine that would enable him to ‘see’ more closely the surfaces he wanted to understand.
Initial studies using x-rays had failed because uncharged particles pass through matter, so George decided to experiment with diffraction by firing charged electrons, 1800 times lighter than atoms, in waves at an object and then studying the pattern they created. As he would explain to students: ‘X-rays tell us about the internal structure of a body but electron waves inform us about the surface because they cannot penetrate more than a few atoms deep.’
When George’s request for college funding to design and build a machine that would enable him to study the surface patterns was rejected, he simply went home and built one himself. His creation would be called a camera even though the finely crafted collection of coils, diaphragms, pumps, vapour traps, rods and tubes resembled an elongated microscope, standing almost two metres tall. Although George designed it as a practical device, he built the finished object with the loving care that had defined the crafting of the Atwood machine, the eighteenth-century pendulum that explained Newton’s laws of motion and had stood in his father’s study all those years before.
The Finch camera, as it became known, was so technically advanced for its time that it would remain the standard until the 1950s – when George improved it himself in order to study thicker films. It used magnetic coils to focus a beam of electrons toward either a crystal or metal film, and then collected them as they diffracted to create patterns imprinted onto a photographic plate.
It was just a matter of time before George Finch’s work would be recognised. In 1928 he was awarded Belgium’s highest civilian honour, becoming a Commandeur in the Order of Léopold, which effectively made him a knight of the court. In 1936 he became professor of applied physical chemistry at the Imperial College and then spent 1937 as a visiting research professor at the University of Brussels, as a recipient of the prestigious Francqui Foundation award. On his return from Brussels in 1938, George was made a Fellow of the Royal Society.
But another, important, achievement remained hidden. George Finch had read Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler’s 1925 manifesto, and was aware more than most of the threat that Nazism posed. During his year in Brussels he would make at least three unannounced trips into Germany, ostensibly to visit academic friends. But his real purpose was to aid young Jewish scientists and students, to bring them out of Germany and find positions for them at the Imperial College or in companies like Imperial Chemical Industries and Ferranti International, for which he had become a part-time consultant.
George would never document his actions, part of a wider effort among London’s scientific community to protect their European counterparts from the madness of war. He would do the same in Belgium during the war and its aftermath, finding opportunities for young scientists from Belgium whose shattered nation had lost most of its facilities and industries. He received no medal or citation for this contribution, nor would he have expected the recognition, although in 1941 George received a letter from the King of Belgium, Leopold III, thanking him ‘for the unstinting assistance he kindly gave to Belgian refugee students in England enabling them to continue their studies’.
34.
F DIVISION AND THE J-BOMB
George Finch was too old to fight when World War II was declared in the autumn of 1939, although his expertise in explosives and ignition would become invaluable. Recruited by the Ministry of Home Affairs as a scientific advisor, his principal duty was to try to restrict the damage wreaked by the bombing raids of the Blitz that erupted a year later.
The situation was bleak. Between September 1940 and May 1941, mass Luftwaffe aerial raids were launched against sixteen British cities. London alone was attacked seventy-one times, at one point being bombed over fifty-seven consecutive nights. Twenty thousand civilians were killed and more than one million homes destroyed or damaged. Birmingham, Liverpool, Plymouth, Glasgow, Bristol and Hull were also targeted repeatedly. Aerial defences managed to stem, but could not prevent, the attacks and many city-dwellers fled the onslaught, seeking the relative safety of the countryside.
George’s task was to limit the damage on the ground. Volunteer fire brigades were drilled and equipped to respond to the fires ignited by the bombs and the incendiary devices designed to spark flames on landing, but what was desperately needed was a better understanding of how the devices worked and how the fires spread. George Finch not only took his role seriously but cherished it: among the collection of his personal effects is a soot-smudged white armband which identified him as a ‘Fire Observer’.
By then, the family was living at Osterley and Moseli, a teenage schoolgirl, remembers accompanying her father as he headed out in the evenings when the air raid sirens wailed. It was with a mixture of excitement and fear that she watched her father, a cool and reassuring figure on the periphery of the devastation, advising the army of volunteers, largely middle-aged tradesmen and white-collar workers who formed the backbone of the Home Guard, on how best to deal with the fires. The next day George would return early to scan the smouldering remains for clues about the spread of the blaze.
George pored over reports written about the fires he didn’t have time to attend, becoming increasingly frustrated that the official observers, although well meaning, were not properly trained. More scientists and engineers were needed to properly study the properties and behaviour of the fires sparked by the bombs. At his suggestion, a training college was set up in Brighton to teach fire marshals about the spread of fire with demonstrations designed to show the significance of heat and how it is transferred. A photograph of the ranks of scientific volunteer instructors eventually recruited reveals that on this occasion George Finch managed to get his own way.
Sharing his knowledge, George would begin his lectures with an anecdote in which he described asking an experienced brigade officer what his job was in dealing with a fire: ‘He immediately replied, without thinking, “to put the fire out, of course”,’ he told his audience of volunteers. ‘Yet nothing is further from the truth,’ George would go on to say.
It was counter-intuitive, he told his audience, but they had to resist the temptation to attack the flames, instead working first to ensure that the fire could not spread. He described the techniques of containment, urging the volunteers to picture a series of compartments that, one by one, were made safe before the beast itself was corralled, cornered and tamed.
Finch also taught them to recognise the most dangerous fuel loads and the rates at which fire would spread on different surfaces. They needed to understand what he called the ‘phenomenon of the passage of fire’, to know the barriers that would stop or at least slow the chances of the flames jumping from one building to another and destroying an entir
e street of homes rather than a single dwelling. There were myriad complexities that could be solved by science, he told them, and it boiled down to how chemicals reacted in heat.
At the height of the Blitz, there had been a series of particularly destructive factory bombings; so large were the blazes that it was feared a new incendiary bomb had been deployed. George was called in to assess the situation and quickly realised that the link between the blasts was not the explosives but the buildings into which the bombs had been dropped. They were flour factories, and the bombs had broken open equipment and sent clouds of fine white flour into the air, which ignited in secondary explosions that were much more devastating than the original blast. George’s solution was to place packets of inert materials around shop floors to counter the incendiary impact of the explosions.
Back at his Imperial College laboratory, he meticulously built scale models of furnished rooms and factories and created a series of experiments to track the way fire spread, ‘preying on its surroundings and spreading like an infectious disease’. His notes show a desire to balance the specific findings based on scientific observation with language that allowed widespread understanding. It was ‘man’s wealth and most precious possessions in life’ – that is, furniture and room contents – which provided the fuel, he noted. Finch’s conclusions, which were credited with saving many buildings and lives during the war years, would later be adopted in the construction of new buildings, long after the war was finished. Just as he had challenged the comfortable stalwarts of the Alpine Club to countenance change, George Finch had pleaded for a co-ordinated approach to fire prevention in order to curtail the loss of life and destruction of homes.
In a speech delivered to the Royal Society in 1946 after the war had ended, he said knowledge had been too ad-hoc and research blindly ignored:
The fireman can study the risks, the scientists can point out fire load, the architect can secure lines of escape and barriers to delay the fire, the legislator can check the irresponsible and help the ignorant, the manufacturer can give us steel furniture and woolen nightclothes for our children, and the ordinary man can exercise a little more care.
Science, of course, plays a varied and often conflicting role in war. Fritz Haber, a man of Jewish origin, invented the gases used to kill millions in the World War II death camps, while his scientific colleague, Carl Bosch, was shunned and shamed for refusing to join the German war effort. William Bone was also opposed to war, but recognised the need for scientific input, pragmatically negotiating for his staff to play their part in the war effort on the proviso that their work did not involve poison gas.
In the early years of the war, George Finch had concentrated his scientific effort on the defence of Britain, but in the late winter of 1942 he used the knowledge he had gained from the study of the German bombs that had caused so much devastation during the Blitz to design an improved weapon that could turn the attack on the enemy.
The Ministry of Home Security had broadened its work and created the Fire Research Division, or F Division, as it came to be known, within the Research and Experiments Department. F Division was led by Lord Falmouth, an engineer and board member of the Imperial College, who wanted George to join his team. George agreed and persuaded Falmouth to also recruit a former colleague, Professor Townend, who at one time ran the high-pressure laboratory at Imperial College and was now working at Leeds University. George was keen to collaborate with Townend to try to understand how radiation from magnesium contained in German incendiary bombs spread through buildings.
The two men’s research revealed that the heat in burning timber rises vertically in a conical shape and that it is burning furniture in buildings, and not the explosion itself, that acts as fuel and heat to set alight floors and joists. This work would lead to a rethink of Britain’s own bomb design, producing a weapon that would shoot out a horizontal rather than vertical flame on landing with the specific intention of spreading fire across floors to set alight as much furniture as possible. It was as logical as it was simple. And it would prove deadly.
George also experimented with the gas used to ignite the bomb’s flames, working with Townend to produce a bomb filled with pressurised butane gas which produced a long and intense flame. The problem was supply and stability, the gas not easily available and much too dangerous to keep inside a military storage facility. The eventual answer lay with petrol sprayed outwards on impact via a combination of metal powder and oxide that was triggered by a fuse. The Jet, or J, Bomb was born.
Two years later, the British air force dropped J-Bombs during raids over Munich, Stuttgart, Bremen, Stettin, Rüsselsheim and Königsberg. Over the following eighteen months more than 800,000 J-bombs were manufactured and dropped on cities across Germany with the aim of demoralising the civilian workforce, just as the German Blitz of 1940 and ’41 had attempted in Britain.
The bomb’s success was announced publicly on August 23, 1944, with dramatic headlines that declared ‘Bomb with 15-foot flame Britain’s new weapon. Already used on Reich’ and stories detailing the raid by 250 Lancaster bombers over Munich in April, which had devastated an area between the city’s railway station and the River Isar. The centres of Stuttgart and Bremen had faced similar devastation as the raids continued through July.
In a bid to excite public imagination as the tide of war began to turn in favour of the Allied forces, the Ministry of War had released photographs and enough detail to reveal how the bomb, now known as the Flying Meteor or Super Flamer, worked. Dropped under a parachute to slow its speed and to ensure that it remained whole on impact, the thirty-pound (fourteen-kilogram) tube crashed through rooftops and fell only as far as the floor, where it could do the most damage. On landing, a detonator fired, in turn igniting a primer which forced a mix of methane and petrol through the tube to emerge in a sheet of flame that would burn for several minutes, creating enough intense heat to fell a brick wall.
‘The Germans have no answer to this. They can’t put it out,’ Townend was quoted as saying.
Even so, the challenges were still coming thick and fast, all discussed in top secret behind the door of George’s office, Room 441 in an unidentified government building, one of the many that line the stretch of Whitehall between Nelson’s Column and the Houses of Parliament. It was here that George worked when not teaching at the Imperial College, here where he advised on the most effective arsenal to carry during bombing raids, and it was here, too, that he brought his meticulous logs and navigation maps from his yachting exploits in the English Channel and offered them to the intelligence division of the Admiralty.
George continued to refine the J-bomb, filling bomb heads with new combinations of metals designed to burn at high intensity on impact. He also worked to make aerodromes safe from crashing aircraft, recommending the use of cowled aircraft propellers mounted on trucks to help clear runways of burning fuel.
True to form, George did not suffer fools gladly, at one point remarking to a critic who dared challenge his conclusions:
I find that the probability of the water freezing is of the same order as a regiment of monkeys banging away on a multitude of typewriters will produce the latest edition of the British Encyclopedia in time for me to consult it during my earthly span. Ergo, every time I repeat the kettle of water experiment I know – I do not expect – that the water will boil.
In January 1943 George had travelled to Newmarket, north of London, to talk to operational crews at No. 3 Group Bomber Command. The visit was to discuss general operations and safety, but in the course of conversation he became intrigued by the concerns of crews carrying ‘photo flash’ flares during aerial reconnaissance missions.
The flares were designed to light up the night sky momentarily to enable aerial photographs to be taken over enemy positions before darkness again enveloped and shielded the planes and crew as they made their way back to safety. But they were dangerous, constructed from an unstable combination of sodium nitrate and magnesium powder that
was sensitive to friction, a dangerous proposition during a jolting flight compounded by vibrations from pounding anti-aircraft gunfire. George left the base determined to find a better and safer flare.
His experiments were swift and revolutionary, not just for British planes but American aircraft which would be modified to his designs. Instead of magnesium, George’s charge used aluminum powder, a much more stable solution that also emitted a shorter and brighter flash and was far more effective for the job at hand. He tested the flares in the tunnels beneath the Imperial College, which he had previously converted into a dark room for high-speed photography.
Just as his advice on fire fighting would help revolutionise post-war housing construction, so too his photo flash would be adapted in later years to aid experiments in shock wave reflection which had implications for the design of heavy machinery, trains and rail tracks, buildings, bridges and shipping.
The success of the J-Bomb had drawn the attention of United States military officials, and in early November 1944 George was part of a high-level delegation on the way to Washington to discuss the bomb’s use in America’s war on Japan. Far from being anxious about the dangerous crossing, George was elated to be back in the thick of the action, as he wrote to Bubbles in a concise cable: ‘Had splendid passage, enjoyed every minute. Putting on weight fast. Love you and all.’
He arrived in Washington armed with carefully written guidelines on diplomacy, which probably only titillated his irreverent and forthright nature. Americans didn’t like to be criticised, particularly by a ‘Britisher’, the guidelines warned: ‘Do not forget that the opinions of a government servant on national affairs carry more weight abroad than at home. Nevertheless, excessive enthusiasm, or an attempt to show that all criticism must be founded on ignorance or prejudice, provokes an unfriendly reaction. Be reasonable, therefore, as well as confident.’
The Brilliant Outsider Page 32