The pair then went on to study the impact of other gases on the quicksilver’s surface, and in 1927 they co-authored a paper entitled ‘Surface Tension and the Spreading of Liquids’. It was the first time that twenty-six-year-old Oliphant’s name had appeared in a scientific journal.
Oliphant would publicly air his gratitude to Burdon when his former physics instructor retired from teaching in 1959, noting the academic debt that he owed. He later added: ‘I know in my heart that I have done nothing since as good as that first original work.’9
A follow-up paper appeared in Nature later that year, at which time Oliphant was encouraged by his senior colleagues to submit an application for the upcoming round of 1851 exhibition scholarships. Oliphant had now discovered a course of original study, and a scholarship would neatly solve the second dilemma he faced if he was to pursue a career at Cambridge: the physical and financial means of getting there.
Just as fortuitously as Rutherford, who had been among the first intake of ‘outside’ students in Cambridge’s sheltered history thirty years earlier, Oliphant would benefit from the decision in 1928 to extend the 1851 scheme and deliver between four and six Australian scholarships, rather than a solitary annual award.
But while Oliphant’s second published paper provided the foundation upon which his scholarship application was built, the 1851 Commission’s criteria extended beyond an aspirant’s ability to commit their research outcomes to writing. They were also required to show ‘proved capacity for original work’, and have their prowess endorsed by judges boasting sound science pedigrees.
Those testimonials came in glowing form from both Kerr Grant and Roy Burdon. The former wrote that throughout his time at Adelaide University, Oliphant had shown ‘an unusually wide and thorough acquaintance with theoretical physics and an altogether exceptional skill in experimental work’.10
Burdon’s assessment was even more effusive. ‘Mr Oliphant’s position and duties have given him practical opportunity for the publication of independent research work, but he has shown himself both skilful and versatile as an experimenter and is the most skilful manipulator of glass and quartz that I have known.’11
In July 1927, Mark Oliphant received notification that he had joined the ranks of the less than fifty successful past applicants from Australia – just three of them from the University of Adelaide’s physics department – to gain an 1851 Research Fellowship. After excitedly breaking the news to Rosa and his family, his first course of action was to send an urgent cable to Cambridge to introduce himself to Rutherford, and to request that he be admitted to conduct postgraduate research at the Cavendish.
It would be years before Oliphant realised that Rutherford – having been elected as a commissioner for the 1851 scholarships in 1921, and appointed to the governing board three years later – had known of his application’s outcome before Adelaide University and its successful candidate were informed. Rutherford’s response to Oliphant’s telegram was a simple pledge. He would reserve a place at the Cavendish for the following term, just months away from starting. It was therefore only a matter of weeks between Mark Oliphant learning of his future and when he embarked upon it.
The £250 annual stipend offered under the 1851 scholarship program (around AU$20,000 today) was almost adequate for a single student travelling abroad, but, as Rutherford’s rival James Maclaurin had realised thirty years earlier, it was too little to sustain a married couple. However, there was no question of setting out on such a significant life journey without Rosa, who quietly adhered to her mother’s advice that ‘where your husband goes, you go’.12
The financial impost that Rutherford had faced in 1895 had been eased slightly in Oliphant’s day by a deal struck with Australasian shipping agencies, which covered the cost of passage for successful scholars. Therefore, the only pause in celebrations came when Oliphant wondered how he might find the funds for Rosa’s fare. When that money was raised, through contributions from the couple’s euphoric families and friends, passage was booked and their voyage viewed as the belated honeymoon they had not previously found time or means to enjoy.
On 10 August 1927, as Mark nursed his personal references from Grant and Burdon as well as the original manuscript of his Nature paper, which he planned to present to Rutherford at their inaugural meeting, the couple began their first journey beyond Australia’s shores. It would be a seven-week sea voyage to Liverpool via Durban, Cape Town and Tenerife, aboard the steamer Ascanius: the same vessel that had delivered Ernest Rutherford into their lives two years earlier.
8
STRING AND SEALING WAX
Cambridge, 1927 to 1928
Today the Cavendish Laboratory museum is set among verdant fields and grazing horses in West Cambridge. Along its whitewashed internal walls, the evolution of the Cavendish graphically unfolds in a sequence of group portraits, stretching back to the century before last.
Every year, save for those when war demanded they be employed elsewhere, staff and research students who passed through the Cavendish’s oak gates – or the sleek reinforced glass entry after the relocation in 1974 – have posed for posterity. A tale of the laboratory’s hierarchy, wordlessly narrated.
In the first, stilted photograph from June 1897, the Cavendish’s then director J.J. Thomson is the centrepiece. His arms are folded firmly across his chest, and unease at the photographer’s staged arrangement apparent in his eyes. Around him, ten young men adopt similarly forced poses. At the frame’s far right, sitting raffishly astride a wooden chair with its backrest to the camera, is twenty-five-year-old Ernest Rutherford.
Three decades on, the group has swelled more than fourfold, with Rutherford, as Cavendish Professor, occupying equal central billing alongside Thomson. The tall, studious figure of the recently arrived Mark Oliphant can be seen at the far end of the third tier.
Come the laboratory’s ‘golden year’ of 1932, Oliphant has gravitated to the second row behind Thomson. Two years later, he has reached the prestigious front seats.
The final physics research students photograph to feature either Rutherford or Oliphant was taken in June 1937, with the pair prominently positioned front-row centre, separated by Nobel laureate Francis Aston. By then, Oliphant was effectively Rutherford’s deputy, and their physical proximity in that poignant image reflected their essential closeness.
* * *
That day remained a decade away as Mark Oliphant hurried through Cambridge’s narrow laneways on the first morning of Michaelmas term 1927. It was not only his attire – the sole tweed suit he possessed contrasting starkly with the billowing academic gowns of the cyclists around him – that told Mark Oliphant he had ventured far from Adelaide. As he turned into Free School Lane, the dirty flintstone wall above him offering no shelter from the softly drumming autumn rain, marked the rear border of Corpus Christi College – established around 500 years before South Australia was colonised.
Such was his haste to take refuge within the Cavendish’s covered entryway that he had no time to absorb the symbolism of that moment. It was the culmination of a journey two years in hopeful planning, and almost two months in physical execution.
Had there been opportunity to pause and peer into the low, grey sky, he might have noticed the figure of the seventh Duke of Devonshire, William Cavendish, set in stone above the entrance. The Latin lessons Oliphant had taken to satisfy his father would have helped him decipher the accompanying inscription: ‘Magna opera domini exquisita in omnes voluntates ejus’, a verse lifted from the Latin Bible that translates as ‘The works of the Lord are great; they are studied by all who delight in them.’ It was as near as the world’s best-known science research facility came to street signage.
As Oliphant entered the passageway and shook the droplets from his broad shoulders and thick, wavy hair, he received a gruff direction towards three stone steps that led to another set of forbidding doors, whence a wooden staircase would take him to the Cavendish’s heart.
What th
e front-gate porter did not warn him about was the tangle of bicycles that lay strewn immediately beyond the doors, parked within the secure confines of the Cavendish’s ground-floor corridors as an antitheft measure.
‘Everybody had parked their bicycle there so they wouldn’t be stolen,’ Oliphant later recalled, noting that he was forever being relieved of his wheels when he visited places other than the Cavendish. ‘A bicycle left in the street was free-for-all. I was continually going to the police station to pick out my bicycle from the hordes of bicycles that had been picked up by the police. Somebody would “borrow” it and go from A to B, and then just abandon the bike.’1
Now Oliphant picked a path through the mess of metal before eyeing a wooden staircase that groaned and squeaked under approaching footfalls. The Canadian research student who loomed into view was delighted to find another Commonwealth colleague, and guided Oliphant up the narrow steps and into an undulating corridor overlooked by sepia portraits of the previous Cavendish professors – James Clerk Maxwell, Lord Rayleigh and J.J. Thomson.
As Oliphant followed the young man, who had introduced himself simply as Henderson, he noticed the thick film of dirt that coated the building’s tall, Gothic windows, minimising the already muted light that penetrated the dank hallways. ‘At first I was a bit upset by the fact that everything was so filthy,’ Oliphant mused much later. ‘I discovered in the end that the windows . . . and the floors were washed once a year.’2
A climb of several more stairs brought them to the Rayleigh Wing. Upon reaching a bare pine door at the end of a short passage, Oliphant was advised to wait until the famous physicist on the other side was ready to receive visitors. The churn in his stomach was not dissimilar to the mild nausea of seasickness that he had recently endured during the six-week voyage from Adelaide, but which had subsided after he and Rosa had changed to the ‘boat train’ that connected the Liverpool docks with London. The couple had stayed there a few days with relatives of his wife’s.
Now, as he loitered distractedly in the corridor awaiting his summons from Rutherford, Oliphant found himself in the company of two other 1851 scholarship recipients. One was Cecil Eddy, recently arrived from Melbourne; the other, from across the Irish Sea in Dublin, was Ernest Walton, whose name would become forever associated with one of the laboratory’s most famous finds. Walton was in even greater turmoil than the two Australians, having confused his paperwork and arrived too late for his proposed meeting the previous morning. All three nervously anticipated their first audience with Rutherford – memories of which would remain forever vivid for Oliphant.
When my turn came, I entered a small office littered with books and papers, the desk cluttered in a manner which I had been taught at school indicated an untidy and inefficient mind. It was raining, and drops of water ran reluctantly down the grime-covered glass of the uncurtained window. I was received genially by a large, rather florid man, with thinning fair hair and a large moustache, who reminded me forcibly of the keeper of the general store and post office in a little village behind Adelaide where I had spent part of my childhood.
Rutherford made me feel welcome and at ease at once. He spluttered a little as he talked, from time to time holding a match to a pipe which produced smoke and ash like a volcano. Later on, I found that he reduced his tobacco to tinder dryness on a newspaper spread out before the fire at home, or on a radiator in the laboratory.3
That Oliphant instantly saw in Rutherford a likeness to Mr Cooper from Mylor’s grocery-cum-everything store offered greater reassurance than did Rutherford’s handshake. Oliphant found it, in contrast to the professor’s boisterous tone, ‘very brief, limp and boneless . . . He gave the impression that he was shy of physical contact with another person’.4
No such reservation emerged from the discussion that followed. After preliminary niceties, Oliphant produced from his jacket’s inside pocket the manuscript of his published work on the absorption of gases upon freshly formed mercury surfaces. Having studied the results that Oliphant had gained with Burdon in Adelaide, Rutherford took a deep drag on his pipe, blew more sulfurous smoke into the already foul air and announced: ‘Well, you can start work at once,’ before adding: ‘I suppose you would like to know what you’ll be doing?’
Oliphant then detailed the experiments he had in mind, which involved the effects produced when positively charged ions struck the surface of various metals, an extension of the work he had earlier undertaken using mercury. The results he hoped to gain, Rutherford acknowledged, could help inform experiments being undertaken elsewhere in the Cavendish to examine the discharge of electricity through gases. Oliphant then reached back into his pocket to remove a further sheaf of folded papers, upon which he had drawn diagrams of the apparatus he would need to undertake that work – most of which he could construct himself, of course.
Rutherford beamed through the fog from the other side of his disorderly desk. ‘Well you can go ahead alone,’ he roared, prising himself from of his chair. ‘By the way, go ’round the lab and talk to the boys. You might start with Aston and Chadwick, and if J.J. is in, he would be interested in your experiment. You’ll find him working in the garage, or in nearby rooms.’5
Oliphant hesitated in the doorway, as he prepared to re-enter the network of gloomy corridors. The prospect that he might come face to face with Sir J.J. Thomson, Nobel Prize winner and discoverer of the electron, or Francis Aston, who had become a Nobel laureate five years earlier for discoveries using his elegantly brilliant mass spectrometer, was altogether too daunting.
As he turned to clarify with Rutherford where he might find this ‘garage’, which seemed a repository for scientific royalty, the professor dismissed him with: ‘Now don’t be diffident. Tell them I sent you.’6
His brain still whirring, Oliphant almost collided with two young men who barrelled out of a room on the opposite side of the corridor. One of them flashed a broad smile, thrust out his hand and announced, ‘I’m Blackett. Who are you?’ Oliphant had already gleaned that the Cavendish’s members addressed one another by surname alone. Blackett then offered to take the new boy to where Rutherford’s world-renowned older ‘boys’ continued to reshape comprehension of the natural world.
‘This was my introduction to Rutherford and the Cavendish Laboratory,’ Oliphant would write years later. ‘Rutherford’s warm welcome and interest, combined with my conviction that I could do better glass-blowing than J.J.’s assistants were able to accomplish, gave me courage. The Cavendish and Cambridge were already becoming part of me.’7
* * *
While it’s scarcely discernible in the current Cavendish Museum’s monochrome images of mainly fresh-faced men, with a scattering of women whose ambitions Rutherford actively encouraged, Oliphant was a few years older than the typical novice research student. He was about to turn twenty-seven, and fully aware that, by the same age, Rutherford had written his name permanently into scientific lore by identifying and naming two distinct forms of radiation – the first in a litany of quite astonishing breakthroughs during the decades that followed.
Within the pool of brilliant young minds that had subsequently followed Rutherford to Cambridge, competition to unearth the next great find was understandably fierce. Which meant that Oliphant was not about to mark time before getting down to business.
In his favour were the ease and intuition with which he could fashion and utilise equipment. These skills, coupled with his willingness to work, meant that he immediately gained Rutherford’s approval. ‘I want you to go with Oliphant,’ Rutherford once counselled Philip Moon, who would spend much of the next decade or more working alongside the Australian. ‘He’s a very fast worker.’8
As a consequence of his obvious abilities, Oliphant was not required to complete an apprenticeship in the ‘nursery’ loft, set beneath the gabled roof among the rarely visited individual offices of various senior staff, including the irascible Charles (C.T.R.) Wilson. This was where his fellow 1851 scholarship holder Walton
found himself immediately stationed, and where Oppenheimer had endured six months of anguish during his time at the Cavendish two years earlier.
Instead of the laboratory finishing school, Oliphant was allocated a workspace in the Rayleigh Wing, under the nose of Rutherford and cheek by jowl with half a dozen other bright young researchers. It was at a benchtop in the corner of this large, upstairs room, which hummed to the tune of gas jets and electrical equipment, that Oliphant began his Cavendish journey.
Initially on his own, and then in collaboration with his research student Moon, he pursued the study of positive ions as he had outlined to Rutherford. He devised new ways beams of those ions extracted from various elements could be accelerated by applying modest electrical charges of up to a few hundred volts. It was work that, over the next two years, would form the basis of his PhD thesis.
Settling comfortably into his preferred role as an experimenter and master equipment manufacturer, he quickly became part of the Cavendish fraternity, which was as eclectic as it was tight.
The most influential characters in his Cavendish life, aside from Rutherford, were James Chadwick and John Cockcroft. At the time of Oliphant’s arrival in Cambridge, Chadwick was Rutherford’s closest experimental ally. The pair were engaged in disintegrating the nuclei of lighter elements by bombarding them with Rutherford’s favoured artillery, the alpha particles given off through natural radioactivity. These particles were obtained from a precious radium source that Rutherford would invariably find the means to procure.
Still visited by regular ill-health as a result of his German imprisonment, Chadwick was an intensely shy, often abrupt figure, whom Oliphant initially found somewhat intimidating. As Rutherford’s deputy and trusted confidant, Chadwick kept an eagle eye on all that unfolded in the cramped, often untidy laboratory, and frequently visited Oliphant at his workbench.
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