Through his friendship with Patrick Blackett, Frisch found work at the University of London’s Birkbeck College. Birkbeck was a workers’ institution where Blackett had been appointed Professor of Physics earlier in the year after a falling-out with Rutherford.
It was also from Blackett that Frisch received a ticket to attend one of the Royal Institution’s monthly Friday Evening Discourses. This one, in 1934, was being delivered by Rutherford, aided by his assistant Mark Oliphant. It was an event of such prestige that men in white ties and coat-tails were delivered to the institution’s brightly lit front foyer in gleaming limousines.
Clad self-consciously in the same faded brown lounge suit that he wore to the Birkbeck laboratory each day, Frisch hovered in the top row of the theatre’s steeply raked seating throughout Rutherford’s presentation, surreptitiously trying to secrete himself behind a pillar while still taking in the spectacle.
The demonstration he witnessed, however, would leave a profound impression. As he marvelled at the institution’s famed Albemarle Street premises, Frisch beheld the passion and the pantomime that Rutherford brought to his demonstration of the Cavendish’s latest atom-smashing apparatus. It was a device that Oliphant – who squirmed anxiously in his formal wear at the foot of the lecturer’s platform, his back to the hushed audience – had carefully transported by car from Cambridge, and installed at the institution earlier that day.
Oliphant was fearful throughout the demonstration that the equipment he and George Crowe had so conscientiously copied from the laboratory version might misbehave in the auditorium, filled with members of the academic elite and the cream of London society. Most of them, in Oliphant’s opinion, had no clue as to the intricacies or significance of elemental transmutation that Rutherford was showing.
The professor, however, was in effusive form, having earlier dined with his long-time friend Sir William Bragg, from whom he had sought out advice at Adelaide University during his maiden voyage to Cambridge in 1895. Bragg was now the Royal Institution’s director, and shared Rutherford’s delight at the first public demonstration of how an atom undergoes artificial transformation. It was a theatrical repeat of Oliphant’s original experiment, whereby deuterium had been bombarded by deuterons to produce helium-3. As he was warmed reassuringly by the eerie light of the humming equipment, Oliphant found faint blushes of pride overriding his anxiety. He would long recall that magical evening.
I borrowed transformers, rectifiers and some capacitors from an x-ray manufacturing firm in London, so that we did not need to cart up the heavier items, and we set the whole lot up on the bench. It was touch and go whether we could get it adjusted and operating before the lecture. In case something went wrong, Crowe had a small radioactive source ready to make the counters operate at the right moment – he was adept at this kind of innocent deception.
However, all went well, and Rutherford was able to demonstrate the actual transformation of deuterons by deuterons to the audience which filled the ancient lecture room. Everyone was delighted, Rutherford most of all. The canal-ray tube glowed, the high-voltage sizzled, and the loud speaker connected with the counter and amplifier thundered with rapidly increasing speed as the voltage was raised.8
It was nine years, almost to the month, since Oliphant had stood similarly silent and enthralled beside a workbench at Adelaide University, as Rutherford held a far smaller audience spellbound with his stories. That was when Oliphant quietly but resolutely vowed he would one day work alongside the great scientist.
Now – on the celebrated stage of the Royal Institution’s Friday Evening Discourse, treading the same worn floorboards on which Michael Faraday had unveiled to the world the power of electricity – Mark Oliphant shared the scientific limelight with Ernest Rutherford, not so much as a pupil, but as an equal.
13
THE CROWN BEGINS TO SLIP
Cambridge, North Wales and Wiltshire, 1934 to 1937
No sooner had the applause of the appreciative if largely clueless quorum at the Royal Institution faded, and the apparatus been repacked into Oliphant’s bull-nosed, second-hand Morris for the return trip to Cambridge, than life there began to demonstrably change. The lustre that had come to characterise the Cavendish under Rutherford was gradually dimming – in no small part due to the once visionary director’s unwillingness to grasp the future.
It wasn’t only his almost paternal attachment to the atom that Rutherford jealously guarded. As nuclear physics’ evolution – like Christian soldiers – marched onward, and required more powerful, more complex, more expensive machinery, Rutherford’s adherence to the methods and means that had brought bygone triumphs grew ever tighter.
As a result, Cambridge’s crown as the benchmark for experimental physics began to slip. And it was gleefully seized by energetic young institutions in Europe and the United States.
Particularly in the lavishly funded physics laboratories of American universities, the race to realise Rutherford’s vision of particle accelerators led researchers to push the limits of experimental voltages and electromagnetic fields. Chief among them was Ernest Lawrence, at the University of California’s Berkeley campus, whose development of the machine destined to redefine nuclear physics would earn him a Nobel Prize in 1939.
His initial design for a linear accelerator proved unsuccessful, but he would subsequently deliver a more far-reaching result, when he pioneered a circular model dubbed the cyclotron. This used a huge dipole magnet (essentially a giant bar magnet whose field can move particles in a circular trajectory) to bend the path of charged particles, which gained speed as they hurtled around the circular track. It was a device capable of accelerating particles to vast speeds without the need for correspondingly high voltages. As a result, Lawrence was able to dramatically increase the energy imparted to the accelerated particles, to levels that were beyond the relatively basic equipment available to Rutherford’s ‘boys’ at the Cavendish – though Lawrence’s influence on them would prove profound.
Oliphant was key among the younger minds at Cambridge who saw the future, but also understood Rutherford’s reticence to yield.
Rutherford . . . disliked large and expensive equipment. He preferred to remain involved, personally, in almost all the work going on in his laboratory. His interest and ability in administration were rudimentary. He dominated the laboratory by his sheer greatness as a physicist, and provided for his colleagues and students only the very minimum of equipment required for an investigation. Rutherford, with his roots in the soil and the hard, practical life of New Zealand, bucolic in appearance, became the deep thinker and the originator of new physical concepts.1
* * *
Rutherford’s refusal to invest in the heavy machinery needed to progress ‘big science’ brought other consequences too. It led, directly or otherwise, to the departure of several influential figures at the Cavendish from 1934 onward. After he had lost Blackett – who had snarled on his way out ‘if physics laboratories have to be run dictatorially . . . I would rather be my own dictator’2 – another of the professor’s favourite pupils, Peter Kapitza, had been refused permission by Soviet authorities to return to Cambridge after attending a 1934 conference in his native Russia.
That was around the same time as C.T.R. ‘Cloud’ Wilson finally retired. Before that, in 1933, Charles Wynn-Williams, whose genius for creating electronic instruments had proven crucial to Chadwick’s discovery of the neutron, had taken up an assistant lecturer role in London, at the Imperial College.
The most totemic departure, however, was that of James Chadwick, Rutherford’s long-time collaborator and laboratory administrator. Despite owing so much to Rutherford for the opportunities and inspiration he had provided, Chadwick eventually surrendered in the face of his professor’s stubbornness. Rutherford refused to recognise that construction of a high-tension laboratory, with apparatus capable of generating up to a million volts, was essential if Cambridge were to keep pace with innovations elsewhere.
&nbs
p; In 1935, Chadwick accepted an offer from the less renowned but more enterprising Liverpool University. He had been assured £5000 – roughly equivalent to the Cavendish’s entire annual budget, and worth around £340,000 today – to build a high-energy cyclotron, as well as extra funding to maximise its impact.
‘I was not prepared to quarrel with him,’ Chadwick later explained as the rationale for ending his sixteen-year partnership with Rutherford and taking up the chair of physics at one of Britain’s ‘red-brick universities’ (as the civic institutions founded in unfashionable industrial centres from the late nineteenth century became known).3 The significance of Chadwick’s decision was not lost on Oliphant, even though he would become its immediate beneficiary.
Chadwick’s frustration was exemplified by a story he revealed in a letter to Oliphant thirty years after Rutherford’s death. It involved a dinner that Chadwick had shared with Sir Hugh Anderson, the son of one of the founders of the Orient Company, a lucrative shipping enterprise, and who was also Master of Gonville and Caius College at Cambridge from 1912 until his death in 1928. Over a quiet meal in the college’s Combination Room, Anderson told Chadwick that he greatly admired Rutherford, but was puzzled as to why the director had refused the generous grant offered him.
Nonplussed by this news, Chadwick confessed he knew nothing of the proposal, nor of Rutherford’s refusal, even though he was effectively the Cavendish’s chief administrator.
Anderson then went on to detail the specifics of the proposal, which he had put forward because he believed the laboratory’s university funding was insufficient to allow it to conduct an optimum level of research. But he also understood the funding could not be increased, due to Cambridge’s over-arching fiscal restrictions.
To help cover the shortfall, Anderson had enlisted support from a number of influential colleagues who were similarly interested in the work that Rutherford and his team were pursuing, and pulled together a purse worth £2000 a year (more than £100,000 per annum today), available within an open-ended timeframe. Rutherford only needed to advise that he required more money, and the next instalment would be forthcoming. As Chadwick recounted:
But Rutherford did nothing, to Anderson’s astonishment and indeed, exasperation. I could offer no explanation for Rutherford’s refusal to say that he needed more money for research. I knew so well how hampered and restricted Rutherford was for lack of equipment and technical assistance, and his attitude was quite incomprehensible to me.
‘This conversation took place some time between 1922 and 1925. It was only some years later that the explanation dawned on me . . . One day I had taken Rutherford up to the [Cavendish’s] Radium Room so that he could assure himself that all was in order. We had, at that time, about 400 milligrams [of] radium in solution for the preparation of radon and active deposit sources [of alpha particles].
I remember well how, as we were coming down the stairs, I said that we did not have enough radium so that I had to allocate sources very carefully to meet the demands; and I said what a pity it was that somebody or other had not made a gift to him of a gram of radium . . .
His reply astounded me. It was: ‘well, my boy, I am very glad nobody did. Just think; at the end of every year I should have to say what I had done with it. How on earth could I justify the use of a whole gram of radium?’. This was said quite seriously.
I had, of course, long realised that Rutherford was modest about his achievements, notwithstanding his eager enjoyment of his reputation, his almost boyish delight in any laudatory references to his work, his susceptibility to flattery – aspects of his character with which you must be familiar. But I had not realised how deeply ingrained his modesty was until I pondered over this remark. And it threw a light on some arguments concerning the spending of money on research, especially on his own work.
It was then that I thought I had an explanation for his refusal to ask for the research subsidy which Sir Hugh Anderson had arranged for him; he did not feel he could justify spending so much money . . . on himself and his research students. And this in spite of his unique position in the scientific world, his extraordinary achievements in the past, and the urgent need to press on with the establishment of nuclear physics as a new branch of enquiry. He was, in truth, deeply modest.4
While humility might have partly accounted for Rutherford’s aversion to private benefaction, he was also unwilling to accept direct industry sponsorship because he feared such subsidies might impugn the independence of his research work. It therefore made sense, as business and science forged a stronger nexus during the inter-war years, that Rutherford would rather go without resources than risk being beholden to commercial outcomes. In Oliphant’s view, it also helped to explain why the professor was so steadfastly reluctant to consider the case for atomic energy.
‘The knowledge of the inmost workings of nature, which it gave, was in many ways to him a sacred subject, not to be profaned by applications with political and industrial implications,’ Oliphant later surmised. ‘For him, scientific investigation was the greatest adventure of mankind.’5
Rutherford might not have welcomed the vested scrutiny he felt accompanied industry partnership, but the frugal ways of his regime were scarcely secret. And it was not only in the experiment rooms and on the workbenches that frayed ends were showing.
Rutherford had never been the most agile presence in a laboratory space increasingly draped in electrical wiring and housing high-voltage death traps. Now, however, the gruff clumsiness that had been cause for mutual mirth in years previous became something of an occupational hazard.
On one drizzling Cambridge morning, Rutherford lumbered up the stairs from Free School Lane to check progress among his ‘boys’ and hooked his damp coat over a live terminal that he mistook for a hat peg. The resulting electric shock only serving to further darken his traditionally grim morning mood.
During Oliphant’s fusion experiments, Rutherford – by then in his early sixties and with hands betraying the early onset of age-related tremors – would make twice-daily inspections of the ongoing work. The first occurred late in the morning, and the second shortly before the laboratory’s mandated 6pm shutdown. During those end-of-day examinations, he would impatiently seek out the gelatinous strips of photographic film used to record the charged particles expelled by exploding nuclei, as Oliphant later recounted:
If Rutherford appeared just at the end of a run, he insisted that the record be developed as rapidly as possible, barely allowed it to be dipped in the fixing bath, and sat at the table in the next room, dripping fixing solution upon our papers and his own clothes, as he examined the tracing. His pipe dribbled ash all over the wet and sticky photographic paper. He damaged it irreparably with the stump of a pencil from his pocket, with which he attempted to mark the soft, messy material. Searching impatiently for the interesting parts of the long record, he pulled it from the coil in [George] Crowe’s hands to fall to the dirty stone floor, trampling on it as he got up . . .
We had then to do our best to finish fixing, washing and drying the paper strips, often damaged beyond repair. When it was possible, we concealed records from him till they had been properly processed and measured up by us, but this was impossible when he was present while the record was being taken.
Once, at the end of a particularly heavy day, when the experiments had gone well, we decided to postpone development till next morning when we were fresh and we could handle the long strip in new developer and fixer without damage. Just as we were leaving Rutherford came in. He became extremely angry when he heard what we had decided, and insisted that we develop the film at once. ‘I can’t understand it’, he blustered. ‘Here you have exciting results and you’re too damned lazy to look at them tonight’.
We did our best, but the developer was almost exhausted, and the fixing bath yellowed with use. The result was a messy record that even Rutherford could not interpret. In the end, he went off muttering to himself that he did not know why he was blessed wi
th such a group of incompetent colleagues. After dinner that night, he telephoned me at home. ‘Er, er, is that you Oliphant? I’m er, er sorry to have been so bad tempered tonight. Would you call in to see me at Newnham Cottage as you go to the Laboratory in the morning?’ Next day he was even more contrite: ‘Mary says I’ve ruined my suit. Did you manage to save the record?’ He drove us mercilessly, but we loved him for it.6
* * *
Yet the challenges Rutherford increasingly faced were becoming emotional as well as physical. From the time of Eileen’s death at Christmas 1930, he had appeared conspicuously afflicted. Arthur Eve, his former colleague from Montreal who would later comprehensively curate his personal correspondence, noted that ‘the loss of his only child who he loved and admired aged Rutherford for a time; he looked older and stooped more’.7
The melancholy to which Rutherford would occasionally succumb following Eileen’s death penetrated more deeply in 1935 when his mother Martha died in New Plymouth aged ninety-two. Although he had not seen her in almost a decade, he wrote to her every fortnight and related in intricate detail the current work in which he was immersed, and the places and people to which his lauded life had taken him.
J.J. Thomson was among the coterie of colleagues and acquaintances who sent messages of condolence to Newnham Cottage upon Martha’s passing. Rutherford wrote back to the man who had effectively taken him in on his arrival from New Zealand forty years earlier: ‘She was a woman of unusual strength of character [and] intelligence and all the family – particularly myself – owe much to her.’8
During their increasingly occasional escapes to the countryside, and at Sunday-afternoon teas in Cambridge, Oliphant saw that sadness had changed Rutherford, by then aged in his mid-sixties. ‘Although normally he often dozed when sitting in an easy chair, while awake he was always busily reading or engaged in some other way. Following his mother’s death he would sometimes sit staring into the distance, immobile and in deep reverie. He soon recovered, but in my view, never completely.’9
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