What was abundantly clear, however, was that farming on the North Island would be Rutherford’s default career if another scholarship could not be won to keep him in science.
South Australia, 1918 to 1919
It was connections rather than qualifications that landed Mark Oliphant paid work when he completed secondary school in late 1918. Schlanck and Co., the Adelaide manufacturing jeweller that hired the seventeenyear-old as a general hand, was run by a friend of Baron’s. Established four decades earlier by Salis Schlanck, a Jewish émigré from Prussia, the firm had won government contracts in 1918 to produce silver-plated peace medals as mementos of gratitude for those who had served in the Great War.
Mark’s place in this enterprise was to labour over the blacksmith’s forge where the metallic alloys were melted down, and sweep the soot-coated floors of the sweltering workshop. While it would instil in him a lifelong interest in silversmithing – the hefty sterling candlesticks he made and bequeathed to South Australia’s Government House being perhaps his most ostentatious pieces – his distaste for this unskilled work stoked a need to chase more rewarding roles.
It was a pursuit that proved repeatedly fruitless.
He first applied for a job as assistant in the testing department of the Adelaide Cement Company, where the interviewer bluntly told the boy that his ambitions were too lofty. Oliphant preferred to believe he had been rebuffed due to his clothing, mostly home-sewn by his mother, who produced her family’s entire wardrobes save for their boots.
He then tried for a similarly junior position at the fledgling Commonwealth Institute of Science and Industry. This time he missed out because the institute was deemed not yet to constitute a permanent statutory authority, and was therefore unable to hire and train staff.
The institution that did see a place for the tall, assured eighteen-year-old was the South Australian Public Library, which had expanded beyond the Institute Building that sat alongside the now-closed destitute asylum. Largely oblivious to the colonial significance of books with ‘Circulating Library’ embossed upon their front covers, Oliphant quickly grew impatient with the menial chores of hand-writing catalogue cards in elaborate copperplate, brand-stamping newly arrived books and re-shelving older ones. More than once, he was upbraided for wasting work time reading texts he was supposed to be restocking.
However, the mundane clerical work came with a crucial benefit. Thanks to encouragement provided to library ‘cadets’, Oliphant was able to pursue a limited range of study options at the neighbouring University of Adelaide as an adjunct to his employment.
It was through this scheme that Mark Oliphant enrolled in a general science degree involving some chemistry, some physics and a smattering of mathematics, which he studied through an ‘evening studentship’. The aspiring science scholar had found a route to further learning.
New Zealand, 1894 to 1895
During his fourth and then fifth year at Canterbury College – studying for a Master of Arts and then a Bachelor of Science degree – Ernest Rutherford’s scientific ambitions took a decisive turn. He had successfully evolved from a diligent mathematics student into an accomplished researcher, but in order to gain a master’s degree he was required to undertake an original investigation.
Professor Bickerton suggested that he study the prospects of forming organic molecules by passing electrical discharges through inorganic gases such as carbon dioxide. But Rutherford momentously chose to turn his back on chemistry, and instead pursue physics.
Initially that shift came through a continuation of work he had begun as an undergraduate, on a topic that excited huge interest in science around the turn of the twentieth century: the properties of electromagnetic (specifically radio) waves. He secured the use of a basement room beneath the steeply raked floor of a lecture theatre at Canterbury College that was otherwise employed to store ceremonial gowns, and transformed it into his own experimental den in lieu of a dedicated physics laboratory on campus. And it was in this unlikely, unused cellar that Rutherford’s brilliance exploded into full flower.
The experiments he conducted with radio waves, using a Hertz oscillator he constructed on the concrete floor of the frigid store room, entertained fellow students, who gathered to watch him send and then record signals through the building’s thick stone walls and iron door. His peers also marvelled at the technical skill he had clearly learned in his father’s home workshops, which was now being applied to ever more intricate machinery.
However, it was his earlier 1894 paper exploring the magnetisation properties of iron when subjected to electric current oscillated at high frequencies – sometimes flicking on and off at intervals of one-hundred thousandth of a second – that gained him far wider attention. This was due not only to the sophistication of the equipment he devised in such comparatively primitive surrounds, which he then applied through his elegantly simple methodology, but also to the audacity of the findings in his final published reports.
The paper that Ernest Rutherford presented to the Philosophical Institute of Canterbury on 7 November 1894 challenged the previously published conclusions of no lesser a triumvirate than Oliver Lodge, then Professor of Physics and Mathematics at Liverpool’s University College; J.J. (Joseph John) Thomson, Cambridge University’s Cavendish Professor of Physics; and the recently deceased Professor Heinrich Hertz of the Bonn Physics Institute, whose name would become immortalised as the unit of measurement for radio waves.
In his first published works, Rutherford effectively declared the exalted trio’s shared view that iron was not magnetic at very high frequencies to be fundamentally wrong. While the twenty-three-year-old student’s assertions were clinical rather than boastful, the assuredness shown by an upstart research student from the far side of the globe caught the attention of more than a few in the closed shop of Europe’s science establishment.
The secret behind Rutherford’s success in proving results that contradicted the learned physics minds of Britain and the Continent was his ability to produce apparatus capable of providing minuscule measurements. This was a feat beyond the scope of most other scientists at that time. This newly realised practical aptitude was complemented by the comparative technical simplicity of the experiments he devised, and the absolute immersion he brought to his chosen subject. Over the course of a couple of published papers, a potent new force in the field of physics was announced.
It was clear, however, that prominence in respected scientific journals and satisfaction at shaking up the institutional establishment as a maverick researcher from the new world were not Rutherford’s principal motivations. Apart from the sheer joy he gained from plotting experiments and obtaining results, his main ambition was to win yet another fiercely contested scholarship. The prize he sought was one born of Britain’s bold gambit to re-establish its centres of learning as the yardstick for worldwide scientific research, and one that Rutherford hoped would grant him access to the very institutions, including Cambridge University, that he had dared to ruffle.
The 1851 Research Fellowships were a legacy of the world’s first international fair, London’s Great Exhibition. It had unfurled between late spring and early autumn of that year at Hyde Park, within an overgrown greenhouse designed by Joseph Paxton that would later earn more regal recognition as the Crystal Palace.
Under the patronage of Queen Victoria and her consort, Prince Albert, the exhibition trumpeted Britain’s industrial prowess and the scope of its empire, showcasing technological enterprise and cultural curiosities from almost fifty sovereign states. Such interest was aroused that around 6 million visitors – a third of Great Britain’s total population at the time – passed through the shimmering glass-and-steel cathedral’s doors.
That patronage ensured that the event turned a profit of £186,000: around £24 million in the currency of today. Much of that windfall went to establishing a precinct immediately south of Hyde Park that became, and remains, home to some of London’s essential landmarks – the V
ictoria and Albert (displaying many of the exhibition’s original items), Science and Natural History Museums.
In addition, Prince Albert oversaw the establishment of a scholarship fund that would allow the most promising research students from across the Empire to pursue their studies at Britain’s acclaimed centres of learning. It was proposed that each year, eight ‘1851 Research Fellowships’ would be offered to worthy aspirants throughout the United Kingdom, as well as Britain’s colonies, which would be eligible to submit candidates according to a roster.
It took until 1891, three decades after Albert’s death, for the first of these scholarships to be realised. That timeline, which saw New Zealand able to put forward candidates on a biennial basis, coincided neatly with Ernest Rutherford’s broadening ambitions and would ultimately benefit Mark Oliphant as well.
But this wasn’t the only item of historical coincidence to fall in Rutherford’s favour. At the time of the Great Exhibition, Cambridge and Oxford Universities were accessible only to Britons. It took until 1895 – just months after Rutherford submitted his initial scholarship application – for Cambridge to accept postgraduate students who had completed their undergraduate degrees at other institutions, whether in Britain or beyond.
On the basis of his landmark thesis work at Canterbury College and the notice it had gained in the wider science community, Ernest Rutherford clearly fitted the 1851 scheme’s criteria. His only obvious impediment was his historically poor record at winning scholarships at the first attempt.
His odds narrowed when only one rival emerged: a chemistry student from Auckland named James Maclaurin. The University of New Zealand – now disestablished but then the nation’s over-arching and sole degree-granting body that incorporated colleges in Auckland and Christchurch – forwarded both applications to the 1851 Commission in London. That was where, after several months of detailed scrutiny and some direct lobbying on Rutherford’s behalf, the decision was made. New Zealand’s allocated scholarship for 1895 was Maclaurin’s.
The ruling led some of Rutherford’s more indignant academic supporters to claim precedent should be shelved and a second scholarship awarded, such was their conviction in his case. But that suggestion was rejected by the commission. With his chances of finding further patronage ever shrinking, Rutherford was all but convinced his days as a scientist were over.
History might have read very differently if the paperwork sent to confirm Maclaurin’s scholarship had not raised immediate concern in Auckland. The clear stipulation that the recipient remain in full-time study for the bequest’s two-year duration, and not engage in any paid employment throughout that time, was at odds with Maclaurin’s plans. Newly married and holding a lucrative job as a government analyst, he knew he would not be granted two years’ leave from a position he could not risk vacating. In April 1895, Maclaurin declined the offer. So the University of New Zealand turned to its fall-back candidate.
While the machinations of bureaucracy ground slowly on, Rutherford had returned to the family property at Pungarehu to take a break from his research and tutoring work during the mid-term holidays that included the Easter weekend. It was there, as winter approached and he was turning sods in the family’s potato patch, that a telegram was delivered to inform him the 1851 scholarship for that year was his.
The tale Rutherford would later recount to Mark Oliphant was that when his mother read the cable aloud, he threw down his shovel and roared: ‘That’s the last potato I’ll dig.’11
New Zealand to England, 1895
Just a few months after receiving news of his scholarship in July 1895, Ernest Rutherford sailed from New Plymouth aboard the SS Takapuna, bound for Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory.
Rutherford’s 1851 exhibition scholarship might have entitled him to tuition at any university that would accept him as a research student, but it did not extend to passage fare from New Zealand. Although he had three university degrees to his name – his research into the capacity of high-frequency electrical discharges to magnetise iron having earned him a BSc in the course of a single year – his attempts to find paid work had proven consistently unsuccessful. Therefore he had been compelled to borrow funds for his journey (his ‘grub stake’, as he called it) from his eldest brother, George, now a prosperous North Island farmer.
Rutherford’s choice of Cambridge as his preferred research destination was primarily driven by the chance to work with the incumbent Cavendish Professor, renowned physicist J.J. Thomson. While Rutherford’s early research paper might have challenged some conclusions Thomson had reached, the young research student held lofty regard for the reputation and rigour of the humble professor, who would forge an early path in sub-atomic study.
But before introducing himself to the most eminent physics researcher in Britain, Rutherford planned to meet with the man who held that title in the Antipodes: William Henry Bragg, at the University of Adelaide. Thus he fleetingly broke his voyage in South Australia during the last month of 1895’s southern winter.
Bragg had garnered acclaim over the preceding decade as Elder Professor of Pure and Applied Mathematics, and shared Rutherford’s interest in radio transmission. Moreover, he was himself an alumnus of the Cavendish Laboratory. It was in fact J.J. Thomson who had encouraged Bragg to declare his interest in the vacant professorship in distant Adelaide: a bold gambit at twenty-three, the same callow age at which Rutherford was now beginning his journey across the globe. Bragg had achieved much since departing his native England – not least his marriage to Gwendoline, daughter of Adelaide postmaster Charles Todd, the employer of Baron Oliphant’s father Harold.
Rutherford knew no-one who lived outside his homeland. And those of whom he was aware through their reputations were mostly in an alternative hemisphere, if not an altogether different league. So it was as much to glean insights as to who and what awaited at Cambridge as to compare notes with Bragg that led Rutherford to Adelaide University in August 1895. There he would encounter, not for the last time, a kindred spirit who would prove a lifelong friend.
When Rutherford returned to the waiting steamer hours later, he carried a formal letter of introduction from Professor Thomson’s former student, as well as some fresh ideas about ‘radioactivity’ – the term then applied to wireless telegraphy.
Throughout his next fifty days at sea, Ernest Rutherford frequently mulled over the material Bragg had given him. It helped to quell the nervous excitement coursing through him while the distant dream he had chased since schooldays drew closer, then closer still, with each hour that passed upon the vast, heaving Indian Ocean.
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‘RABBIT FROM THE ANTIPODES’
Cambridge, 1895 to 1898
Ernest Rutherford’s mood was as bleak as the low, grey sky on that dull, chilly Thursday morning. It was early October 1895, and he was on his way to London’s Liverpool Street Station, having hauled himself from his boarding-room bed, where he had spent the previous three days with a severe cold compounded by a painful bout of neuralgia. Now he was forced to push through the crush of commuters huddled against the early autumn cold and the Victorian-era grime, while sporting a pronounced limp.
As if his first days in the unfamiliar and unwelcoming city had not sufficiently stirred pangs of homesickness for the unfettered streets and clean air of Christchurch, he had also slipped on a banana skin discarded on the footpath and severely wrenched his knee. If not for the gravity of his mission – a first meeting with Professor J.J. Thomson at the Cavendish Laboratory – the young visitor would have gladly returned to the refuge of his room.
However, the hour-long, non-stop journey flashed by in a montage of inner-city tenements, outer suburbs and – finally, as Rutherford’s renowned good humour gradually returned – the deep green pastures of the eastern Home Counties. ‘The country is pretty enough,’ he later noted, ‘but rather monotonous.’1
The first curiosity Ernest Rutherford observed upon alighting at Cambridge was that the railway
station, with its grand archways and columns, decorated with ornate friezes and cornices, was not located anywhere near his ultimate destination. Fearing the impact that hordes of visitors might wreak on their staid community as rail networks spread across Britain in the mid-1800s, the influential colleges of Cambridge University had flexed their collective muscle and demanded the train station be sited two kilometres from the town’s centre. And that no rail traffic be permitted to stop there on Sundays.
Hobbled and heavy-headed, Rutherford was therefore compelled to hail a horse-drawn cab to make his appointed meeting. The unexpected sights that confronted him once they cleared the low rows of railway cottages along Mill Road made him feel like he had travelled much further afield than the ninety kilometres that separate Cambridge from London.
As the cab skirted the large expanse of lawn that his driver proudly announced to be ‘Parker’s Piece’, Rutherford glimpsed a few similarities with the world he had left behind at Canterbury College. One was the predominant dress code of full academic gown and mortar-board headwear for the young men, who gathered in groups upon the grass, or dashed down the winding streets and narrow alleys as the cab pushed deeper into town. What he had not expected was the preponderance of people on bicycles, a mode of transport that dominated the landscape in every direction his head swivelled.
Against the backdrop of the centuries-old limestone buildings and the haywire network of roughly cobbled laneways, Rutherford noticed other cultural peculiarities that he would come to understand more acutely over coming months. Among them was the edict that cap and gown be worn by students when out at night, on Sundays (except for the afternoon), during lectures, at chapel and in the dining hall, where college residents were expected to take meals at least five nights per week.
The Basis of Everything Page 5