So Rutherford and Soddy ploughed on, working long hours but mindful to avoid the term ‘transmutation’. Rather, they substituted ‘sub-atomic chemical change’ to denote the process through which a chemical atom spontaneously broke up.
One of the methods Rutherford harnessed to explore changes taking place within an ionisation chamber was to gently fill it with tobacco smoke from the pipe for which he had developed a liking during his separation from Mary. In so doing, he incidentally devised a precursor to the modern household smoke alarm.
* * *
So intransigent was Mary Newton towards the twin vices of drinking and smoking that Rutherford wrestled with how best to advise her he had been seduced by the latter. Barely a year into his Cambridge stint he had penned a heartfelt mea culpa to his fiancée.
A good long time ago, I gave you a promise I would not smoke and I have kept it like a Briton, but I am now seriously considering whether I ought not, for my own sake, to take to tobacco in a mild degree. You know what a restless individual I am, and I believe I am getting worse. When I come home from researching I can’t keep quiet for a minute, and generally get in a rather nervous state from pure fidgeting. If I took to smoking occasionally, it would keep me anchored a bit, and generally make me keep quieter. I don’t think you need be the least bit alarmed . . . For I don’t think I will ever become a confirmed smoker.9
Smoking had been almost expected of research staff and students at the Cavendish, and Rutherford had acquired a pipe habit despite his earlier pledge. The practice was frowned on at McGill, whose benefactor William Macdonald was an avowed anti-smoking zealot, even though he had accumulated his vast fortune through the sale of tobacco products. Yet the pipe went with Rutherford to Montreal – largely because his fiancée did not.
Soon after arriving in Canada, he had written to Mary advising her that Montreal’s steep rents meant he would need some time to build up the cash resources required to bring her to Canada. Consequently, he decreed they would have ‘to postpone our partnership for eighteen months from now’.10
It was not until June 1900, four years after they had committed to wed, that Ernest and Mary Rutherford finally married in New Zealand. Within a year of settling in Montreal, their only child, a daughter, was born.
Even upon assuming the responsibilities of fatherhood, Rutherford rarely allowed his mind to drift far from his work. After the baby’s birth on 30 March 1901, he wrote to his mother at Pungarehu.
The baby, much to Mary’s delight, is a she and is apparently provided with the usual number of limbs. There is much excitement in college and on the night of her arrival I was toasted at a whist party. It is suggested that I call her ‘Ione’ after my respect for ions in gases. She has good lungs, but I believe uses them comparatively sparingly compared with most babies. The baby is, of course, a marvel of intelligence and we think there never was such a fine baby before.11
Rutherford eschewed his colleagues’ tongue-in-cheek advice, and the girl was mercifully named Eileen Mary. The family had taken up residence in a modest, but comfortable home in Sainte Famille Street, a short walk from the campus and its Physics Building. In the early years of her married life, Mary Rutherford was a quiet, almost shy soul whose preoccupations in the unfamiliar city were her home, husband and daughter. ‘I am not a society woman,’ she would confess. ‘There’s no use trying to make me into one. I love my home and my garden. That’s where I belong.’12
However, as Ernest’s fame began to grow, and his presence was sought at scientific fora and awards ceremonies across North America and Europe, Mary’s assuredness grew in step with her worldliness. While the Rutherfords’ modest early holidays took them to nearby locations such as Kamouraska, further up the St Lawrence River, by 1903 they were visiting countries such as Switzerland, as Mary began to embrace the trappings of Ernest’s new-found celebrity. In late 1904, she and Eileen returned to New Zealand for an extended holiday with family in Christchurch. Her husband finally joined them in May the following year, after completing his first book (entitled Radio-activity). It was Rutherford’s first visit home since his marriage five years earlier and, as he discovered during a tour of the North Island’s thermal districts with his wife and daughter, his profile had increased considerably in that time.
* * *
For Rutherford himself, the rewards lay in a regular stream of vital breakthroughs, many of them commonplace knowledge today. Work increasingly consumed him, and even on Christmas Day of 1901 – the first he had shared with his wife and then nine-month-old daughter – he visited the laboratory to record radioactivity emanations.
By tracking levels of radioactivity emitted by naturally occurring elements, he and Soddy found that the rate at which that output decreased followed a consistent geometric progression. In the case of the thorium compound he tested, its output was halved after sixty seconds, and then halved again a minute later. This process was applied across numerous elements and compounds, and the time it took any given sample to reduce its level of radioactivity by half could be charted on an exponential curve – introducing the notion of radioactive half-life.
That method could then be used to determine the age of any material that emitted detectable rays, such as uranium. By extrapolation, Rutherford was then able to calculate a creation date for the earth itself, of around 4.5 billion years ago, give or take 50 million: roughly the half-life of the predominant naturally occurring uranium isotope (uranium-238). This was a discovery that stunned geologists and biologists, who believed the earth was between 20 and 40 million years old. Many of them viewed Rutherford’s ‘radiation clock’ with deep cynicism, even up until the oldest known mineral exhibit – a sliver of zircon hewn from the inland Jack Hills range north of Perth in Western Australia – was found in 2001, and dated to almost 4.4 billion years old.
Rutherford would later delight in recalling his encounter with McGill’s geology professor, Frank Dawson Adams, during a walk across campus in the early years of the twentieth century.
‘How old is the earth supposed to be?’ Rutherford inquired of his colleague, with mischief sparkling in his blue eyes.
‘One hundred million years,’ Adams replied, after momentarily pondering the calculations that Lord Kelvin had made four decades earlier, and which had remained widely accepted throughout the science fraternity.
Rutherford then grinned knowingly as he reached into his pocket to extract a lump of pitchblende, a radioactive mineral prized for its high uranium content. ‘I know for a fact that this piece of pitchblende is 700 million years old,’ he declared before walking on, chuckling, while Adams was left muttering into his slipstream.13
The method Rutherford had employed to underpin this assertion was disarmingly straightforward. By determining the proportions of uranium and radium in the pitchblende, then calculating the release of alpha particles – which he had deduced were helium atoms – he could measure the levels of helium that remained within the rock. Then, through the application of simple division, he was able to nominate the period in history in which the substance, in its complete form, had been born. He determined that this period was up to 200 times earlier than science had previously accepted.
He and Soddy had noted the pattern of ‘transmutation’ in other elements, and believed that the emanations they so diligently tracked were smaller, lighter atoms being spat out by the source material. The energy release that accompanied that process came from the breaking of bonds that held these atoms together. Ernest Rutherford and his occasionally anxious young accomplice had floated a concept that the world would come to recognise, albeit decades later, as atomic energy.
In the years that followed, Rutherford repeatedly scoffed at claims that the breaking of atomic bonds might unleash catastrophe, by pointing out that radioactivity was as old as the earth itself: a birthdate that he had calculated, and which had passed without leaving any evidence of an atomic explosion.
But he could not resist slipping in his favourite jokes w
hen discussions about the impact of sub-atomic research turned to the potential perils it held.
‘Could a proper detonator be found, it’s just conceivable that a wave of atomic disintegration might be started through matter which would, indeed, make this old world vanish in smoke’ was one attributed to him in an article written by a Cambridge associate.14
Another was pithier, and more prescient. ‘Some fool in a laboratory might blow up the universe unawares,’ he would occasionally warn, before letting loose a volley of booming laughter.15
Rutherford’s public refutations of the perils of probing the power that held together atoms, and the dark humour he liked to employ when undertaking that work, helped to mask his own innate concerns as to the forces he and others were tapping. As his investigations took him deeper into the heart of matter, and his appreciation of the energies residing there became clearer, he saw the potential of that power if it could somehow be harnessed. However, he and Soddy also feared for the planet if those discoveries were made against a backdrop of, and for the purpose of prosecuting, international conflict.
After their research partnership dissolved in 1903, with Soddy returning to England to take up the position at University College London, it seemed the younger man had also gleaned Rutherford’s freakish talent for predicting the future. The following year, Soddy delivered a lecture on radium to the Corps of Royal Engineers in which he articulated his thoughts on the potential application of the work he and Rutherford had pursued.
It is probable that all heavy matter possesses – latent and bound up with the structure of the atom – a similar quantity of energy to that possessed by radium. If it could be tapped and controlled what an agent it would be in shaping the world’s destiny! The man who puts his hand on the lever by which a parsimonious nature regulates so jealously the output of this store of energy would possess a weapon by which he could destroy the earth if he chose.16
Soddy’s career would later take him to the Universities of Glasgow and Aberdeen, then back to Oxford and – in 1921 – garner him a Nobel Prize for his work on radioactive decay and formulating the concept of isotopes. He was in no doubt as to who had been the most direct contributor to his success.
Upon learning of his Nobel triumph, he wrote to Rutherford, ‘acknowledging the debt I owe you for the initiation into the subject of radioactivity in the old Montreal days. But for that, I suppose the chance of my ever getting the Nobel would have been exceedingly remote.’17
* * *
During his nine years at McGill, Rutherford would be involved in drafting an extraordinary sixty-nine scientific papers: more than the total output of his subsequent research career. Yet it was the substance more than the volume of his work that saw him shine ever brighter in what was the lustrous firmament of worldwide physicists.
In 1903, Rutherford was elevated to fellowship of the prestigious Royal Society in London and, on travelling to Britain to receive the honour, he grasped the opportunity to introduce Mary – accompanied by her mother – to his growing group of friends and contemporaries in Europe’s science community. Among them was Ernest’s former Cavendish Laboratory neighbour, Paul Langevin, who had overcome his initial wariness of Rutherford as a ‘force of nature’ at Cambridge. In 1902, Langevin had returned to France to study with Pierre Curie.
The Rutherfords arrived in Paris on the same June day that Curie’s thirty-six-year-old wife, Marie Sklodowska Curie, received her doctorate from the Sorbonne, to the undisguised resentment of the otherwise exclusively male French scientific elite. Langevin invited both couples for dinner, and Rutherford – whose university experience in New Zealand was of male and female students accepted and recognised equally – struck up an immediate rapport with the intense, quietly spoken Madame Curie, who was dressed head to toe in black.
As dinner service finished and midnight approached, the quintet retired to Langevin’s garden. Pierre Curie then produced a small tube containing a trace sample of the preciously rare radium that he and his wife had painstakingly separated from pitchblende in their laboratory. The vessel, partly coated with zinc sulfide, glowed ghostly in the darkness as the radioactivity worked its magic. But even under the soft light of a Parisian moon and the eerie luminescence from the glass flask, Rutherford noticed the raw and inflamed state of Professor Curie’s hands, which at times had difficulty gripping the receptacle.
Rutherford immediately thought of his own laboratory, where he had noticed that items on workbenches, even their notebooks, had begun to return low-level radioactivity readings. Even though he had fortuitously suffered no ill effects from his pioneering exploration of the embryonic science of radioactivity, warnings as to the lethality these substances might possess were starkly, if silently, conveyed by Pierre Curie’s gnarled, trembling fingers.
* * *
The increase in Rutherford’s profile brought commensurate demand for his person. The year after gaining his Royal Society fellowship he was awarded its Bakerian Medal, which recognised outstanding achievement in ‘natural history or experimental philosophy’. Recipients of the prestigious award were also required to deliver a lecture, a tradition first practised in 1775, and in 1904 Rutherford spoke at length on the theory of radioactivity.
Among previous winners of the Bakerian Medal were some of the great names of British science – Humphry Davy (who in the early 1800s discovered, through electrolysis, elements including sodium, potassium, magnesium and calcium), Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell and J.J. Thomson, as well as German-born physicist Arthur Schuster, who had worked alongside Maxwell at the Cavendish.
In 1907, Schuster announced he would stand down from his position as Langworthy Professor of Physics at Manchester University – essentially the same post as had once been held by Balfour Stewart, whose Physics primer had proven so influential – if Rutherford would agree to succeed him. Rutherford had already rejected multiple offers from American institutions of growing repute, including Columbia and Stanford. As he continued his work at McGill, he was nominated for the directorship of Washington’s Smithsonian Institution, and three times within five years he was approached to take over the physics chair at Yale University.
However, his regular visits to Britain and Europe to receive awards and acclaim had stirred his yearning to be closer to science’s historic heart, and the tabling of a salary that was double that of McGill made the decision clear. Despite having purchased a parcel of land in Montreal, on a hillside that offered uninterrupted views of the Lake of Two Mountains, Ernest and Mary shelved plans to build a house and forge a life in Canada.
Instead, Rutherford accepted the position on offer at the University of Manchester. So significant was this recruiting coup considered that Britain’s parochial press shrilled with the news that, after almost a decade at McGill, New Zealand’s most celebrated expatriate was coming ‘home’.
The world would be forever changed as a consequence.
5
THE ATOM SMASHER
Manchester, 1907 to 1919
‘By thunder,’ Rutherford roared, slamming his meaty fist down on the speaker’s lectern.
He was addressing his first meeting of the University of Manchester’s combined science faculties. The newly appointed Langworthy Professor had just learned that – in the course of the horse-trading that had prised him from Montreal – floor space, equipment and personnel originally earmarked for his physics department had been appropriated by rival chemistry professor Harold Baily Dixon.
It wasn’t only the thrift instilled within him by an early life on the land and the frugality he had experienced at the Cavendish that made Rutherford proprietorial towards the tools of his trade. In the weeks preceding his departure from Montreal in May 1907, McGill had lost two major buildings – engineering and medical – to fires thought deliberately lit. He was therefore not about to surrender crucial resources required for his ongoing experimental work to a force as readily extinguishable as a fellow don.
If the shocked
silence did not reassure him his pre-emptive salvo had struck its mark, then his second attack surely did. He followed the target of his ire out of the meeting, shouting theatrically down the corridor: ‘you are the fag end of a bad dream’.1
As was now wincingly apparent, Rutherford had arrived at Manchester with a bang. Within weeks of the meeting, he had regained all that had been purloined and, just as symbolically, he had announced to the Science Faculty – and the entire university – that he was indeed a force of nature. While his demeanour in polite society was affable and unaffected, he could unleash an explosive temper when events refused to bend to his will, or careful plans were laid waste.
If reminded of such intemperate outbursts, Rutherford was known to wear his directness as a badge of honour. As the principal guest at the Cavendish’s annual research dinner in 1911, he would laugh uproariously when the meeting’s chair introduced him by noting that, among all the budding young physicists to have graced the famous laboratory, Rutherford was peerless when it came to swearing at equipment.
Rutherford was not, however, the first scientist of such eminence to grace Manchester’s echoing corridors and damp courtyards. The institution had begun its life more than eighty years earlier as the industrial city’s Mechanics Institute, and had counted among its founders the acclaimed chemist John Dalton, author of the first atomic model. In 1880, it had received a royal charter to become England’s first ‘civic university’ (where students from all religions and backgrounds were accepted on an equal basis), and duly adopted the formal title ‘The Victoria University of Manchester’.
Upon arriving in Manchester in late May, the Rutherfords spent a week or two searching for a house before opting to take summer holidays on the Devonshire and Cornish coast. When they returned north for the beginning of the new academic year, they moved into a comfortable home in Withington, about three kilometres from the university. Withington had once been a standalone village, but so rapid had the city’s growth been during the Industrial Revolution and beyond that it had now been subsumed into Greater Manchester.
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