When the family shifted to Cambridge months later and found it still unoccupied, Mary insisted that Ernest lease it from its owners, Caius College, and give it a major rebuild and refurbishment. The large garden, featuring a vast lawn that unfurled beneath sprawling trees and a mulberry bush along one of its distant perimeters, was a luxury virtually unknown in the heavily populated suburbs of Manchester. Mary wanted the grounds fastidiously maintained, which meant Ernest was compelled to take up a weekend hobby other than jaunts in the car.
As Rutherford reported to one of his former McGill colleagues, work was still going on early in 1920, almost a year after the family had settled in:
We are in our home in Cambridge but still share it with the workmen. But we hope to have them out before long. It is New Year’s Day and I have been exercising myself . . . in sawing up a big tree in the garden so feel quite virtuous after a good day’s work.
I have thoroughly enjoyed my stay in Cambridge. The Lab has been crowded with both students and researchers but all has gone pleasantly and I hope efficiently. We are very short of room and must extend before long. I have been buying a good deal of apparatus to fill up the gaps and have been cleaning up the place generally.4
Requisitioning additional floor space and modest infrastructure for the Cavendish had been among Rutherford’s first orders of business. He knew that realising the vision that guided his journey required an ongoing investment not only in technology, but also in personnel. He also reasoned that, with the war ended, ‘the rising prestige of this country and the eclipse of Germany will lead to an increase in the number of research students from neutral and allied countries who wish to work in the Laboratory’.5
In addition to his requests for more places where physics could be taught and trialled, he called for the employment of extra lecturers, and for another chair of physics to be endowed. In the still-recovering social and economic climate, however, Cambridge University was unable to meet most of these demands, so Rutherford had no choice but to maximise the dividends of his own ingenuity and of the Cavendish’s reputation. By so doing, he attracted a stellar team from throughout Britain and further afield.
Prominent among them were a charismatic Russian physicist (and another future Nobel laureate), Pyotr (Peter) Kapitza, and Englishman Patrick Blackett, the former commander of a naval destroyer whose ground-breaking sub-atomic photographs would feature in Rutherford’s lectures. Under Rutherford, workspaces, ideas and results were freely shared at the Cavendish, and often robustly debated. This created a camaraderie rarely known amid the professional jealousies of other old-world institutions.
Wednesday afternoons were enshrined as the timeslot for the Cavendish Physical Society lecture, often delivered by a distinguished visitor to the laboratory. Rutherford would preside over these much-anticipated gatherings, and – having adopted British custom as firmly as she had embraced the class system – Lady Rutherford would also attend to serve tea. She had enjoyed resuming her Manchester custom of regular Sunday-afternoon teas in new surrounds at Newnham Cottage – and took even greater pleasure in putting students to work in her garden.
On Wednesday afternoons, the tea ritual was played out in the laboratory’s poky Rayleigh Library, a space that smelled of stale biscuits and was not much suited to the sort of gathering that Mary liked to host. It was never made clear whether she was responsible for the book on etiquette that mysteriously appeared among the science texts on the library shelves.
By 1922, the irrepressible Kapitza had also founded his eponymous club, which brought the Cavendish’s younger members together a few times each month, and often showcased a guest presenter who would bring members up to speed on the latest issues in physical science.
On one occasion, that speaker was Niels Bohr, whose rambling dissertation on German theorist Werner Heisenberg’s complex ‘uncertainty principle’ prompted Rutherford to intervene and call a halt. The professor acerbically observed that his Danish friend’s ‘sense of time was as uncertain as the principle he was discussing’.6
Heisenberg, who later became a controversial figure due to his involvement in the Third Reich’s atomic aspirations, himself addressed the Kapitza Club in July 1925. He spoke about the highly specialised topics of multiplets and Zeeman effects, and also answered questions on his recent research paper dealing with a new field that was changing the theoretical understanding of the universe – quantum mechanics.
* * *
Rutherford had quickly ushered in a new golden age of research at the Cavendish, despite being viewed as something of a patriarchal Victorian figure in both appearance and character by many post-war students. These were the days when university professors ruled their academic domain as a kind of personal fiefdom, yet Rutherford revealed himself as a benevolent lord.
Partly that was due to his disarmingly bluff persona. Those who had worked with Rutherford during his earlier incarnation at the Cavendish recognised the same loquacious character. As ever, his response to each exciting research outcome, or potential sighting thereof, was to burst into a preposterously loud, and even more tuneless, chorus of ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ as he marched off to his next assignment.
The descriptions of those most regularly in his presence paint a portrait uncharacteristic of a typical inter-war Cambridge don. One newspaper likened him to ‘a hearty farmer who’s enjoying his breakfast . . . his healthy colour, blunt features, shrewd eyes, heavy limbs, and even his easy tweeds, with their baggy pockets, all seemed aggressively agricultural’.7
Charles (C.P.) Snow, who gained his physics doctorate at Cambridge under Rutherford in 1930 before pursuing a career in literature, would remember his professor as ‘a big, rather clumsy man with a substantial bay window that started in the middle of the chest [as well as] large, staring blue eyes and a damp, pendulous lower lip’. Snow also evaluated Rutherford’s New Zealand accent (via Montreal and Manchester) as ‘bizarre . . . it sounded like a mixture of West Country and Cockney’.8
For all his avowed commitment to updating Cambridge’s equipment and outlook, Rutherford was reluctant to dispense with habits from the past. Financial conservatism was one of those traits – as was his slavish insistence that time be set aside each afternoon to undertake the counting of alpha particles. This practice had proven the cornerstone of his discoveries at Manchester, and remained a non-negotiable element of life under his rule at the Cavendish.
As Charles Ellis, who had foregone his chosen military career at war’s end to pursue research work under Rutherford, later vividly recalled of that daily ritual:
Counting the scintillations was difficult and tiring, and Rutherford usually had one or two of his research students to help him . . .
Sitting there drinking tea, in the dim light of a minute gas jet at the further end of the laboratory, we listened to Rutherford talking of all things under the sun. It was curiously intimate, but yet impersonal and all of it coloured by that characteristic of his of considering statements independently of the person who put them forward.9
* * *
In June 1920, barely a year after assuming the Cavendish professorship, Rutherford was awarded the Royal Society’s annual Bakerian Medal, the second time he had been honoured with the venerable organisation’s pre-eminent prize for physical sciences. He had previously earned the distinction in 1904 while at McGill, when his accompanying lecture centred on his discoveries relating to radioactivity. While the title of his second Bakerian Lecture – ‘Nuclear Constitution of Atoms’ – gave no hint as to its extraordinary prescience, it remains one of the oftest-quoted addresses in the award’s almost 250-year history.
In his lecture, Rutherford explained in incremental detail how he had deployed alpha particles harvested from naturally occurring radioactive elements to bombard the core of a nitrogen atom until it forcibly released a hydrogen nucleus. It was, as had been revealed in his paper the previous year, the successful first step in the artificial transformation of matter.
; However, he then went on – to stirrings among his audience, who sensed their orator was straying into the realms of scientific fiction – to make a series of predictions. These statements would doubtless have been enshrined as utterly fantastic had they not, within the span of fifteen years, been proven unerringly correct.
The first was to foresee a hitherto unknown form of hydrogen that carried double the atomic mass of the known element, and which would become integral to the processes of nuclear energy and weapons. (This material, when finally discovered in 1932, would gain the name ‘deuterium’.)
The other was to float the notion of a neutral particle that would, if its existence could be proven, open the floodgates to the transmutation of matter, due to its capacity to circumvent existing electrical fields. The alpha bullets deployed by Rutherford and others were sufficient to penetrate the magnetic forces generated by nuclei of lighter elements. However, these fields were so strong that they protected hefty elements like uranium simply by deflecting any attack from charged particles.
Such an atom would have very novel properties. Its external field would be practically zero, except very close to the nucleus, and in consequence it would be able to move freely through matter. Its presence would be difficult to detect by spectroscope, and it may be impossible to contain in a sealed vessel. On the other hand, it should enter readily the structure of atoms, and may either unite with the nucleus, or be disintegrated by its intense field, resulting in the escape of a charged hydrogen atom, or an electron or both.10
Rutherford referred to this figment of his unerring insight as a ‘neutral doublet’. The world would come to know it, when it was eventually discovered at the Cavendish a dozen years thereafter, as the neutron.
In retrospect, Rutherford’s conjecture proved a prediction of extraordinary acuity and courage. At the time, however, it was largely ignored, and soon forgotten beyond those in the immediate audience. To the staid scientific community, swayed only by peer-reviewed journals, it owed too much to speculation.
So, while the notion of the mysterious neutral particle remained in the back of Rutherford’s fecund mind, the forefront continued to be occupied by the immediate concerns of the Cavendish Laboratory, and the responsibilities that came with being the world’s foremost physicist.
As a result, the hunt for the ‘neutral doublet’ was instead taken up by Rutherford’s most recent right-hand man, James Chadwick. A student at Manchester University, Chadwick – like so many others – had decided to abandon his mathematics course in favour of physics after he attended a lecture delivered by Rutherford in 1908.
He had been working in collaboration with Hans Geiger in Germany when war broke out, and was detained as he hurriedly tried to return to Britain. He then spent the entirety of the conflict at Ruhleben, a one-time horse-racing track in the Berlin borough of Spandau that became a British internment camp.
Although housed in stables, each converted to sleep six men on flimsy mattresses, Chadwick set up a crude laboratory in the freezing conditions and conducted experiments using German toothpaste, which contained mildly radioactive thorium powder. He also constructed a makeshift magnet from salvaged lengths of copper wire.
When released at war’s end, Chadwick had returned – destitute, and in badly failing health – to recuperate in Manchester, where his father had worked as a railway porter. Learning of his plight, Rutherford had found him a part-time teaching position and then a studentship at the Cavendish. His kindness was repaid by the zeal with which the quiet, often withdrawn Chadwick took to his research task.
In the meantime, Rutherford himself continued to rewrite human understanding of the natural world. At a British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting held in Cardiff in August 1920, he suggested that the positively charged nucleus of the hydrogen atom should henceforth be called the ‘proton’. The term was duly adopted.
During the following year, Rutherford enlisted his fame to help Vienna’s Radium Institute, whose standing as the pre-eminent source of the highly prized radioactive material had suffered so severely as a result of the war and its political fall-out that the institute faced financial ruin. Having gratefully received a loan of radium from the institute while at Manchester, only for the element to become the annexed property of the British Government at the outbreak of war, Rutherford now set about raising money to reimburse the institute for its loss, even though his access to the raw material had been revoked.
In 1922, Rutherford was awarded the Copley Medal – the Royal Society’s most prestigious honour, presented each year since 1731 for outstanding research achievement in any facet of science – for his examination of radioactivity and atomic structures. It placed him among exalted company that included Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Priestley, Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur and – three years after Rutherford’s elevation – Albert Einstein.
However, the event that brought as much pride and fulfilment as any peer recognition or laboratory revelation was the marriage of twentyyear-old Eileen to Ralph Fowler on 6 December 1921. The nuptials took place in the chapel of Rutherford’s beloved Trinity College, where Fowler was a fellow. That, coupled with the knowledge that Fowler had attended Winchester College, famed for schooling Britain’s social and intellectual elite since the fourteenth century, helped Rutherford to overlook the reality that his son-in-law was, by profession, a mathematician.
Rutherford’s renown had become so great that in September 1923, the British Broadcasting Company decided it would air his presidential address to the British Association’s annual congress, held in Liverpool. It was the first time a scientific lecture had been broadcast live into homes throughout Britain. It drew a generous response from informed listeners who found it stimulating to hear an expert in his field speak in depth on such a complex topic. A significant portion of the audience complained, however, that the subject matter was unintelligible and requested the exercise not be repeated.
Yet demand for Rutherford’s appearances grew around the world, along with his reputation. In July 1924, he and Mary – accompanied by Eileen and Ralph Fowler – returned to Canada for a British Association meeting in Toronto. Afterwards, while the others took a horseback-riding trip through the Rocky Mountains, Rutherford repaired to a lakeside cottage in Quebec with his former McGill colleague (and subsequent biographer) Arthur Eve, where the men devoted their time to swimming, a few games of deck tennis and fly-fishing for speckled trout.
When an invitation arrived from the University of Melbourne’s Overseas Lectures Committee suggesting a six-week lecture tour in 1925, comprising nineteen events in all six of Australia’s capital cities, both Rutherford and his wife initially balked at the work and time commitment. A revised itinerary was then presented, comprising instead a three-and-a-half-week sojourn with speaking engagements in Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. The addition of a further two lectures in New Zealand sealed the deal.
‘The primary intention is to see my people,’ Rutherford candidly admitted to another of his former McGill University colleagues, Robert Boyle. ‘But incidentally I shall give some lectures in the main cities of Australia and New Zealand.’11
In early September, hours after the couple disembarked in Adelaide and her husband attended a reception in his honour at the town hall, Lady Rutherford boarded the train for Melbourne, whence she would travel onward to Sydney then sail for New Zealand on the first available service. It was on the following day that Rutherford made his informal visit to the University of Adelaide’s physics department that, unbeknown to him at the time, had such a consequential impact on Mark Oliphant, the young student who would soon revere Rutherford as both icon and idol.
When Rutherford set foot on home soil later that month, after similar receptions in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, his arrival hailed the start of a triumphal return – one that the fêted favourite son somewhat sheepishly described as ‘a semi-Royal tour’.12 His itinerary had been meticulously planned by his former Manchester labora
tory partner Ernest Marsden, now New Zealand’s assistant director of education, and it included a series of civic receptions, free transport on any government-operated rail network and a private motor vehicle placed at the Rutherfords’ disposal when staying at major centres.
Rutherford delivered lectures in Auckland and Wellington, in his former home town of Nelson – where he ‘found the house where I was born at Brightwater had been removed and was now occupied by a chicken run’13 – and in Christchurch. It was there, in the city where he and his wife had met, that the conquering hero was greeted by a stirring performance of a Maori haka presented by students from Canterbury College. Afterwards, the dance troupe illustrated the reverence in which Rutherford was held by manually dragging his vehicle, with Ernest and Mary on board, to the city’s municipal chambers for yet another formal function.
The reception afforded Lady Rutherford during other stopovers on their Antipodean tour was usually much less celebratory. These days she was often known to betray a brusque, overbearing manner; the colonial shyness she had initially betrayed after leaving Christchurch had given way to a burgeoning sense of entitlement as her husband’s stature, and their resulting circumstances, flourished.
Having grown used to domestic staff as befitting Sir Ernest’s elevated station, she bemused her husband’s aged parents when she stayed with them at New Plymouth, where they had moved upon leaving Pungarehu. Each evening she would place her soiled shoes outside the visitors’ bedroom door, and James Rutherford, now eighty-seven (and just years before his death in May 1928) would take it upon himself to quietly clean them. During that visit, she also insisted that Ernest’s young nieces and nephews address her as ‘Lady Rutherford’, rather than simply ‘Auntie Mary’.
The Basis of Everything Page 11