From the cohort of college fellows a number of proctors were elected to patrol Cambridge’s streets at nights, and on Sundays, in full academic dress. As Rutherford would later understand and occasionally witness, these vigilantes were deployed to keep order by ensuring that the strict demarcation between senior and junior students – in addition to the stringent dress protocols – was observed. They were also authorised to issue monetary fines and administer discipline, a task they outsourced to accompanying pairs of constables, readily identifiable in top hats and tail coats. These ‘bulldogs’, as they were known, would dispense rough, ad hoc justice to students deemed to be misbehaving or inappropriately attired, or found to be consorting with young women.
Rutherford felt relieved when his driver announced they had reached the Cavendish Laboratory – only to discover he had been mistakenly deposited at Cavendish College, on the opposite bank of the River Cam.
Life in Cambridge, as he had gleaned in less than an hour in his new home town, loomed as both daunting and different.
* * *
As alien as Cambridge appeared and felt to Rutherford during that initial day trip, he took comfort from the ensuing meeting with J.J. Thomson, who would become his confidant and collaborator in many triumphs to follow.
Of that first meeting in the early autumn of 1895, Rutherford wrote to his betrothed Mary Newton, who assumed her given first name when there existed minimal risk of confusion with her namesake mother and was waiting patiently in Christchurch:
I went to the [Cavendish] Lab and saw Thomson and had a good long talk with him. He is very pleasant in conversation and is not fossilised at all. We discussed matters in general and research work and he seemed pleased with what I was going to do.
He asked me up to lunch . . . where I saw his wife, a tall, dark woman, rather sallow in complexion but very talkative and affable. Stayed an hour or so after dinner then went back to town [London] again. I like Mr and Mrs both very much. She tried to make me feel at home as much as possible . . .2
Thomson, who had been chosen as Cavendish Professor eleven years earlier at just twenty-eight, was the third man to hold that exalted office, a lineage that stretched back to the year Rutherford was born.
It was in mid-1871 that the Cambridge University Council had gratefully accepted a gift of £6300 (worth around £800,000 today) from William Cavendish, the seventh Duke of Devonshire, who had succeeded Prince Albert as the university’s chancellor. The bequest was intended to bankroll the building and staffing of an experimental physics department. It was generally acknowledged that Cambridge’s influence in that discipline had steadily waned since Sir Isaac Newton’s discoveries in motion, optics and mathematics two centuries earlier.
The man appointed as the laboratory’s inaugural professor was James Clerk Maxwell. His discoveries in relation to colour theory, thermodynamics and mathematics paved the way for enhanced understanding of the physical world, and the resultant upsurge in experimental and theoretical physics. He was also a pioneer of colour photography. Albert Einstein, when visiting Cambridge University during the 1920s, was congratulated on his remarkable discoveries but reminded that he effectively stood upon the shoulders of Isaac Newton. ‘No’, Einstein countered. ‘I stand on the shoulders of James Clerk Maxwell.’3
Maxwell oversaw every detail of the proposed new Cavendish Laboratory, including its site in the rather grandly named Free School Lane, a narrow alleyway that skirts the rear wall of Corpus Christi College. This unobtrusive location was based on Maxwell’s belief that the distance from Cambridge’s heavily trafficked thoroughfares would minimise vibrations that might otherwise interfere with experimental work.
Incorporated into the three-storey building, within its starkly Victorian Gothic façade, was a ground-floor magnetism room, which was vital to the accurate calibration of all electrical equipment in the laboratory and set on a concrete slab almost fifty centimetres thick to ensure its stability. There was a 4.5-metre-high ceiling in the battery room, which provided constant electrical power to all demonstration and work spaces, and was located immediately below the lecture theatre. This theatre fitted 180 students, in steeply raked rows of seats, overlooking a massive oak demonstration bench. To overcome the chill that rarely abated during term time, warmth came from a network of hot-water pipes, which were fashioned from copper, so as not to play havoc with the magnets. And the sprawling first-floor laboratory, with its ten purpose-built work tables, allowed constant monitoring via two hatches secreted in the walls of the adjacent professor’s room.
The laboratory was still three years from completion when Maxwell delivered his maiden address as Cavendish Professor on 25 October 1871. He articulated a clear vision of what he expected his new facilities to achieve:
The familiar apparatus of pen, ink and paper will no longer be sufficient for us, and we shall require more room than that afforded by a seat at a desk, and a wider area than that of the blackboard. Whatever be the character in other respects of the experiments which we hope hereafter to conduct, the material facilities for their full development will be upon a scale which has not hitherto been surpassed.4
Over the next almost quarter of a century, the Cavendish Laboratory established and then embellished its reputation for diligent and important research. That growth was overseen by Maxwell until his premature death aged forty-eight in 1879, from abdominal cancer. The role of Cavendish Professor was then filled by John William Strutt, the third Lord Rayleigh, whose renown in experimental and theoretical physics was known from his earlier years at Cambridge. He had a personal interest in the determination of electrical standards, and would establish the ohm as the absolute standard unit of electrical resistance.
Under Rayleigh’s guidance and his talent for raising funds from influential friends, the Cavendish widened its scientific ambitions to encompass the full breadth of classical physics. The laboratory became recognised as the benchmark against which all other experimental physics facilities could be measured.
It continued to grow in importance and repute under the stewardship of Thomson, whose research as Cavendish Professor focused on the mathematical and experimental issues of electromagnetism. That work built substantially on earlier discoveries by James Clerk Maxwell, and was a central factor in Ernest Rutherford’s choice to undertake his 1851 exhibition scholarship at Cambridge.
* * *
J.J. Thomson immediately became more than a scientific mentor to his young New Zealand research student. He schooled Rutherford in Cambridge’s mysterious ways, and inducted him into the curious rituals of Sunday golf. Thomson’s wife, Rose, became almost a foster mother to the twenty-four-year-old, not only keeping a keen eye on his welfare, but also securing him lodgings with a kindly Cambridge widow. To stave off homesickness, Rutherford fixed photographs of familiar Christchurch landmarks to the walls of his rented room.
Within weeks of his arrival at Cambridge, his insatiable work ethic and unflinching focus had him spending five nights of every seven working in the laboratory, often until near midnight. Barely two months into his scholarship, Rutherford fronted his first lecture as a demonstrator.
Rutherford’s dedication to science might have immediately endeared him to Thomson, but at an institution that had not previously hosted students from outside its own clearly defined stratum, he was generally greeted with suspicion. That grew to distaste among a coterie of postgraduate researchers who took a condescending view of colleagues who hailed from the further reaches of the globe, such as the United States, Canada, and certainly New Zealand. If the hale and hearty, egalitarian manner instilled by Rutherford’s upbringing in a diaspora all but devoid of entrenched social class didn’t immediately set him apart, then his booming voice, thunderous laugh and florid farm-boy appearance provided circumstantial cause for distrust. Invited to take a place at the head table during a formal King’s College dinner in January 1896, Rutherford confided in a letter to Mary Newton that he felt ‘like an ass in lion’s skin’.5
One of his Cavendish contemporaries, Dr Andrew Balfour, wrote of him: ‘We’ve got a rabbit here from the Antipodes, and he’s burrowing mighty deep.’6 Frenchman Paul Langevin, another of Cambridge’s inaugural intake of overseas postgraduates, worked in an adjoining room to Rutherford’s and was asked about their relationship. He replied bluntly: ‘One can hardly speak of being friendly with a force of nature.’7 One less diplomatic colleague reputedly referred to the colonial as ‘a savage, however noble’.8
The disconnect was at times mutual as Rutherford struggled to make sense of Cambridge, and Britain more broadly. Even as summer brought out daffodils along the River Cam and picnic blankets on the meadows between the stately college buildings and the waterway – known collectively as ‘The Backs’ – he continued to find the soot and smoke that enveloped Victorian England towns utterly depressing compared with the crisp air of the Canterbury Plains. Travelling further into the Midlands, he was struck by the backwardness of British rural life, where thatch was still employed as a common roofing material. With disbelief, he wrote to his mother: ‘You can’t imagine how slow-moving, slow-thinking the English villager is. He is very different to anything one gets hold of in the colonies.’9
There was, however, familiarity to be found within the laboratory. Rutherford had resumed the research into radio waves that had captured his interest at Canterbury College. A few months into his scholarship, he presented a demonstration at the Cavendish during which the signal he sent from a Hertz oscillator (spark transmitter) was received almost 200 metres away. Months later, he set up the transmitter in an open space on the southern bank of the Cam and placed a receiving device inside a house on nearby Park Parade, where it successfully recorded the signal from a distance of 275 metres. Within days, he had extended that range to around 1.2 kilometres, double the distance across which Italian Guglielmo Marconi had recently been able to perfect transmission at his father’s estate in Bologna. Consequently, Rutherford became the holder of the global benchmark in the lucrative developing technology of wireless transmission, if only fleetingly.
It was during 1896, and less than a year into his time at the Cavendish, that Rutherford abruptly quit radio waves as a research interest, thereby turning over the field of wireless technology – along with its accompanying fame and riches – to Marconi. While Rutherford’s innate belief that science should be pursued for its pure outcomes rather than possible commercial gain has been suggested as a possible reason for the switch, it’s equally plausible he had simply locked on to a fresh challenge. That challenge was the study of sub-atomic matter, which had become world physics’ cause célèbre at almost the same moment as Rutherford entered the Cavendish.
* * *
In the final weeks of 1895, news had emerged from central Germany that drastically changed the landscape of physical science. Dr Wilhelm Röntgen, Director of Physics at Bavaria’s University of Würzburg, had made a chance discovery when working with the sort of discharge tube that had become an instrument of choice for physicists. These were thin-walled, purpose-blown glass vessels from which air could be evacuated by vacuum before rarified gases were introduced. The tubes contained positive and negative electrodes, between which a high-voltage current could travel. It was known that gases were poor conductors of electricity due to their neutral charge, but when they were subjected to extremely low pressure and sufficiently high voltages, the electrical discharges they produced could be observed within the tubes, often in lurid colour. It was a procedure that would eventually yield neon lighting.
In preparing equipment for the following day’s experimental work, Röntgen darkened his laboratory to gauge the glow that would emanate from a tube when it was receiving electrical input, thereby indicating it was ready for the next series of tests. The tube in question had been encased in a thick, black carton to prevent any exterior light source from interfering with his observations, but in the darkened workspace he noticed a faint glow coming from a paper disc several feet away. That plate had been coated with barium platinocyanide, a known phosphorescent. When Röntgen placed impediments of varying thicknesses between the electrified tube and the disc – even over distances up to two metres – and the fluorescence continued, he understood that the rays being emitted could pass through solid matter.
The most startling revelation came weeks later, when Röntgen enlisted the aid of his wife, Bertha, who placed her left hand on a photographic plate while the tube emitted its rays for fifteen minutes. The result was the now emblematic, skeletal image of her fingers, complete with wedding ring in situ. Bertha Röntgen’s response to this ghostly image, produced by emissions of such mystery their discoverer labelled them ‘x-rays’, was reputedly: ‘I have seen my own death.’10
The science world was similarly stunned when Röntgen’s paper ‘On a New Type of Rays’ was published in Nature magazine in January 1896. The excitement was due not so much to the potential medical benefits of being able to examine the internal structure of animate objects without slicing them open. Rather, physicists saw that discovering a means of measuring these x-rays’ interactions with other forms of matter might, in turn, unlock secrets about the structure of atoms.
Months after ‘x-ray’ became a scientific buzzword, third-generation French physicist Henri Becquerel added a couple more: ‘natural radiation’. Becquerel was aiming to establish a link between x-rays and naturally occurring phosphorescence. Having inherited from his father a supply of uranium salts that were known to fluoresce when exposed to sunlight, Becquerel wrapped photographic plates in multiple sheets of black paper and metal foil before exposing them to the salts. He noted that, upon removing the covering, the plates had ‘fogged’ due to rays that had penetrated the outer layers. By chance, the experiment was repeated on days of thick cloud cover, which showed that the phenomenon – later dubbed ‘radioactivity’ – was not dependent on the source material’s interaction with solar rays.
The notion that naturally occurring elements were capable of releasing measurable forms of matter, which appeared to defy the millennia-old premise that the atoms from which everything was formed were indivisible, would become the central focus of global science for the next half-century. And nowhere would it be more intensely pursued than at the Cavendish Laboratory.
Initially, J.J. Thomson foresaw that if what he described as invisible ‘ions’ could be released from within these natural elements through the application of electricity, and then examined, they might reveal themselves to be a product of the breakdown of the chemical bonds that held atoms together. That would present an opportunity to venture into a world of matter smaller than had been previously investigated, by studying electricity’s passage through gases.
It seems likely that Thomson then encouraged his prized New Zealand research student to embark on that journey with him. It was an opportunity that Rutherford fairly leaped at.
Upon immersing himself in sub-atomic study, Rutherford wrote to Mary Newton: ‘The great object is to find the theory of matter before anyone else, for nearly every professor in Europe is now on the warpath.’11 In a separate missive sent soon afterwards, he warned his fiancée in partially self-deprecating terms: ‘I have some very big ideas which I hope to try and these, if successful, would be the making of me. Don’t be surprised if you see a cable some morning that yours truly has discovered half a dozen new elements . . . The possibility is considerable, but the probability rather remote.’12
In April 1897, J.J. Thomson became the first to identify a sub-atomic particle. His discovery of the electron – initially labelled the ‘corpuscle’ but recognised by a new name within months – earned him a Nobel Prize and gilded the Cavendish Laboratory’s reputation for world-leading research. It also brought the first revision of the atomic model in almost a century, overturning John Dalton’s once revolutionary idea – one that both Thomson and Rutherford had studied in textbooks – that atoms were uniformly solid, unyielding spheres. It had been known as the ‘billiard b
all’ model.
Thomson’s radically revised picture that the atom was not an indivisible sphere but comprised electrically charged particles was dubbed the ‘plum pudding’ theory. He proposed that electrons, represented by pieces of fruit in orderly arrangement, buzzed around in small orbital rings within a gelatinous, dough-like mass of positive charge that countered their polarity.
Thomson’s discovery set physics laboratories throughout Europe, and some in North America, into a frenzy of investigation. Their collective quest was to divine more about the ‘jolly little beggars’,13 as Rutherford dubbed the charged particles he had been enlisted by his professor to track. That complementary work found Thomson’s electrons to be so infinitesimal they were between 2000 and 4000 times smaller than a hydrogen atom.
* * *
Rutherford might have expected that such groundbreaking work alongside Thomson would see his status within Cambridge raised. But while the university’s student profile had broadened through its newly inclusive admissions program, other prevailing attitudes at an institution steeped in British rigidity remained staunchly unflinching. In particular, its antiquated financial structure had refused to yield to modernity.
As an entity, Cambridge University was comparatively poor. Its true wealth resided with the network of powerfully autonomous colleges. Some of these – including Corpus Christi, Gonville and Caius, and Trinity Hall – had been founded in the fourteenth century and had accumulated vast assets through investment of their endowment funds. In 2018, it was revealed that the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge universities collectively own more British land – worth £3.5 billion – than does the Church of England.
The Basis of Everything Page 6