Before the Fallout Page 4

  James Rutherford earned his living for a while, like his father, as a wheel-wTight, but life was hard and the large family struggled. In 1883, after other ventures had failed, James loaded wife, children, and possessions onto a paddle steamer bound for Havelock, where he worked as a flax-miller, processing flax harvested in the adjoining swamps. The young Ernest enjoyed roaming the countryside, shooting pheasants and wild pigeons for the pot. Newton­like, he also made models of waterwheels and enjoyed taking clocks to pieces and reassembling them.

  Rutherford's obvious intelligence coupled with relentless curiosity and remarkable powers of concentration won him a scholarship to the small but prestigious Canterbury College in Christchurch, part of the University of New Zealand. Here Rutherford excelled in mathematics and physical sciences. In his fifth year, after gaining his B. A., M. A., and BSc, he turned to research. The recent discovery in 18 8 8 by the German scientist Heinrich Hertz of electromagnetic waves, or radio waves as they are called today, caught his imagination. He developed a magnetic detector—a prototype radio receiver—to pick up radio waves.

  However, without funds to support himself, an academic career seemed beyond his grasp. His father, whose flax business had not prospered, was in no position to help. Rutherford pinned his hopes on winning an 1851 Exhibition Scholarship. The Great Exhibition, an international celebration of industry, science, and commerce instigated by Prince Albert and held in London in 1851, had attracted over 6 million visitors and made a fat profit, some of which had been channeled into scholarships to pluck gifted science graduates from across the empire and bring them to Britain. Rutherford was digging in the family garden when the postman brought the letter announcing he had been awarded a scholarship for his work on magnetism and electricity. He reputedly flung down his spade with the triumphant cry of "That's the last potato I'll dig."

  In 1895—the year that Rontgen discovered x-rays—Rutherford borrowed money for his passage to England, packed up his magnetic detector, and set out. Almost immediately on reaching London, he skidded on a banana skin and wrenched his knee. It was several days before he could catch a train to Cambridge and limp into the famous Cavendish Laboratory. His scholarship did not specify which university he should go to. It was up to Rutherford to find a place where he wanted to work and which was willing to accept him. The Cavendish, with its impressive pedigree, seemed a promising possibility.

  The laboratory had been founded in the 1 870s by William Cavendish, the gifted seventh duke of Devonshire, who, according to an admiring article in Vanity Fair, "would have been a rare professor of mathematics" had he not been born a nobleman. The first holder of the Cavendish chair of physics had been James Clerk Maxwell, a Scottish laird who in 1 864 had published his theory of electromagnetic fields, showing that electricity and magnetism constituted a single fundamental unity. Taking up his appointment in 1871, he had prophetically warned against the prevailing opinion that "in a few years all the great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation . . . left to men of science will be to carry on these measurements to another place of decimals. . . . we have no right to think thus of the un­searchable riches of creation, or of the untried fertility of those fresh minds into which these riches will continue to be poured."

  The Cavendish and its amiable director, Professor Joseph John Thomson, impressed Rutherford immediately. Known to his students as J. J., Thomson was a Manchester-born mathematician, the son of an impecunious bookseller. In 1884 he had been appointed head of the Cavendish Laboratory at the age of just twenty-eight. His reluctance to pay for elaborate or expensive equipment, perhaps the result of his impoverished childhood, had established the legendary "sealing wax-and-string" tradition of the Cavendish, where everyday materials were ingeniously used to make and patch up experimental equipment, with sealing wax proving particularly useful for vacuum seals. Thomson was, Rutherford noted, badly shaven, with long hair, a small straggling mustache, and a thin, furrowed, clever-looking face. He also had "a most radiating smile" and, at just forty, was "not fossilised at all."

  J. J. Thomson in the Cavendish laboratory

  Rutherford decided that he would indeed like to work at the Cavendish. He was fortunate that Cambridge University had just opened its doors for the first time to research students who had graduated elsewhere and was prepared to accept him. With characteristic optimism he hoped he would quickly make enough money from developing his magnetic detector to enable him to marry his fiancee, Mary Newton, the eldest daughter of his erstwhile landlady in Christchurch. Soon he was bustling vigorously around Cambridge, setting up experiments and receiving radio signals from more than half a mile away. As a "colonial," he was perceived as something of an oddity and was sometimes the object of clumsy jokes, but his robust good humor, undoubted ability, and passion to find things out impressed his colleagues. One wrote with grudging admiration, "We've got a rabbit here from the Antipodes and he's burrowing mighty deep."

  When news of Rontgen's x-rays reached Cambridge, a greatly excited J. J. Thomson obtained one of the very first x-ray photographs and urged Rutherford to study the phenomenon. He progressively weaned Rutherford away from radio waves, leaving the field of commercial radio development to Guglielmo Marconi, whose work at this time was not as advanced as Rutherford's. Rutherford began replicating Rontgen's experiments. The methodology for producing x-rays struck him as very simple, and by the end of 1896 he classed himself as an authority. He was by then working closely with Thomson on explaining how x-rays made gases capable of conducting electricity. He was fascinated by the behavior of the ions—electrically charged atoms—which made this possible. When a colleague cast doubt on their existence, he indignantly replied that ions were "jolly little beggars, you can almost see them."

  One of the first x-ray images of a human

  Reports of Henri Becquerel's discovery of penetrating rays emitted by uranium salts and of Marie Curie's experiments with uranium ore roused Rutherford's curiosity still further. By wrapping uranium in successively increasing layers of thin aluminum foil and observing how the growing thickness of the foil affected the nature and intensity of the escaping radiation, he realized that the uranium was emitting at least two distinct types of radiation. He named them "alpha" and "beta" from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet. Alpha rays could be easily contained, but beta rays, one hundred times more penetrating, could pass through metal barriers. He also believed he detected the presence of a third and highly penetrative radiation—later called "gamma rays" by the Frenchman Paul Villard, who is also sometimes credited with their formal discovery. However, the cause and origin of each of these radiations was, as Rutherford wrote, a mystery which he determined to solve.

  At the same time, Rutherford was keen on enjoying Cambridge. With interests far beyond science, he relished the rich texture of university life and, as he wrote to his fiancee, overcame "my usual shyness or rather self-consciousness." His vigorous intellect attracted people from all fields, including a Hegelian philosopher who invited him to breakfast. The meeting was not, apparently, a success. Rutherford wrote that "he gave me a very poor breakfast, worse luck. His philosophy doesn't count for much when brought face to face with two kidneys, a thing I abhor." Rutherford was elected to several exclusive academic clubs, and he had plenty of friends to vacation with. At a seaside resort he was amused when a policeman asked him to swim farther along the beach because the landlady of a boardinghouse opposite objected to the sight of young men in swim suits. He wrote to Mary that "the alarming modesty of the British female is most remarkable—especially the spinster, but I must record to the credit of those who were staying there, that a party of four girls used to regularly do the esplanade at the same hour as we took our dips."

  Meanwhile, Rutherford's mentor, J. J. Thomson, was about to make the most significant scientific find of the late nineteenth century, a discovery which would profoundly influence Rutherford's own career. Thomson had been investigating the
nature of cathode rays. He was convinced that they were some kind of electrified particles and, to prove his theory, began testing their behavior in electric or magnetic fields. By measuring both the extent to which such fields deflected them and their electrical charge, he discovered that cathode rays consisted of very small negatively charged particles whose mass was about eighteen hundred times less than the lightest known substance—the hydrogen atom. They were, in fact, totally different from an atom. He initially named these tiny carriers of electricity "corpuscles." Later they would become known as "electrons."

  The corpuscles were, in fact, the first subatomic particles to be found, but their nature was much debated at the time. Their discovery hinted that the atom was not indivisible. Thomson himself admitted that "the assumption of a state of matter more finely subdivided than the atom is a somewhat startling one." A colleague later told him he thought Thomson had been "pulling their legs." Thomson's work suggested an alternative vision—the instability of matter—to that of the indivisible atom. It was revolutionary stuff. Since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries most leading scientists, including Newton, had believed the atom to be the smallest unit of matter. Some of the ancient Greeks had shared this view—the word atom comes from the Greek atomos, meaning "indivisible."* In the early nineteenth century the English Quaker scientist John Dalton had defined the atomic theory that, by J. J. Thomson's day, remained the orthodox view. This stated that atoms were the basic and smallest units of matter. Each chemical element consisted of huge quantities of identical atoms. What differentiated the respective elements was only the atoms' weight and chemical activity. Dalton's vision of atoms was the Newtonian one of hard, indestructible billiard balls whose arrangement determined the characteristics of chemical compounds.

  While the scientific world mulled over the implications of Thomson's discovery, the ambitious Rutherford was preparing to move on after just three years at the Cavendish. In August 1898, helped by a testimonial from Thomson praising his originality of mind, the twenty-seven-year-old New Zealander was appointed professor of physics at McGill University in Montreal. The tobacco magnate William MacDonald—a man who hated smoking—wished to use his wealth to fund a world-class physics laboratory. Rutherford's task, as he wrote enthusiastically to Mary, would be "to do a lot of original work and to form a research school to knock the shine out of the Yankees!" It was the perfect outlet for his ambitions. As early as 1896, as he pondered the significance of Ront­gen's x-rays, he had written to Mary that the challenge was "to find the theory of matter," in other words, to discover what matter consisted of, "before anyone else, for nearly every professor in Europe is now on the warpath." It was a race in which, in his view, "the best sprinters" were the Curies and Henri Bec­querel, but he believed that he, too, had a chance.

  · · ·

  Although Rutherford was stirred personally by the spirit of competition, the early twentieth century was still a time when scientific results were shared internationally and scientists met each other on friendly terms. However, the world in which they operated was highly nationalistic and competitively imperialist. Even the United States was busy putting down a guerrilla insurgency in its new colony of the Philippines. Britain was involved in the long struggle with the Boers of South Africa. The cause was partly for foreigners' rights in the Boer republics, but also partly about control of the Rand diamond fields. When the British won, Life magazine concluded, "A small boy with diamonds is no match for a large burglar with experience."

  Japan was still largely unknown to the West, but it had been modernizing rapidly since the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Its defeat of China in 1894-4c. had shocked the world and prompted the German kaiser to coin the expression diegelbe Gefahr—"the Yellow Peril."

  Western guidebooks praised the port city of Hiroshima for its lacquer work, bronzes, exquisite landscaped gardens, and succulent oysters. (The latter were cultivated on bamboo stakes driven into the seabed and regularly exposed at low tide.) But during the Sino-Japanese War it became the most important military base in western Japan. Hiroshima's sixteenth-century founder, the warlord Mori Terumoto, had named the city for its striking and strategic waterside setting—Hiroshima means "wide islands." The delta of the River Otagawa breaks into six channels as it flows down from the mountains to the north through the city to the silver waters of the Inland Sea, producing a series of fingerlike, sandy peninsulas that were then crisscrossed from east to west by more than seventy bridges. At the southern tip of the easternmost peninsula sat the newly constructed Ujina port, built partly on reclaimed land and connected to the main city railway station by a four-mile spur built in just over two weeks.

  In 1894, after making this short rail journey from barracks in the city, troops had embarked for China from the harbor. Lighters carried men and supplies out to the larger transport ships that lay at anchor side by side with the navy's gray warships. The emperor moved his imperial headquarters from Tokyo into the sixteenth-century Hiroshima castle. Imperial officials chatted in the city's bustling teahouses and formal gardens landscaped with maple and cherry trees. The emperor ordered the construction of a new building to house meetings of the Japanese Parliament, known as the Provisional Diet, and himself came to Hiroshima to attend its meetings.

  Mori Terumoto

  Hiroshima for a period assumed the status of a temporary capital. In 1900 its port was busy once more as Japanese troops sailed to China to help Western forces suppress the Boxer Rebellion. With the support of the formidable empress dowager of China, the Boxers—a peasant sect opposed to the increasing territorial and commercial exploitation of China by the West and Japan—had risen up, murdering the Japanese and German envoys and imprisoning the Western ambassadors for fifty-five days in their legations in Beijing. Japanese troops made up roughly half of the international relief force and impressed Western observers with their discipline and courage. They would be even more impressed when, in 1904, Russia and Japan would go to war over their conflicting commercial and territorial aspirations in Korea and Manchuria. Hiroshima would again become a major port of embarkation. Its citizens cheered the departing troops and nursed the returning wounded. Kimono-clad members of the Shinshu Aki Women's Association met in Hiroshima's Honganji Temple, where, kneeling decorously back on their heels, they rolled more than ninety thousand bandages to bind the soldiers' wounds. They rejoiced at news of Japanese success.

  The Russian Baltic fleet sailed around the world to ignominious destruction at the Battle of Tsushima by the Japanese fleet commanded by Admiral Togo. On land, Japanese troops won many victories and occupied the Russian island of Sakhalin. The American president Theodore Roosevelt brokered a peace conference, a pioneering move onto the world stage by the United States. Under the terms of the peace treaty, Port Arthur and the southern half of Sakhalin were leased to Japan, Korea became a Japanese dependency, and Manchuria returned to Chinese sovereignty. Many Japanese thought the terms too generous to Russia and protested with considerable civil disturbances. Admiral Togo's flagship was sunk in Tokyo harbor, and a fire in a major army storehouse in Hiroshima was rumored to be the work of arsonists opposed to the treaty. To the rest of the world, Japan's victory meant that it had become a major power and a considerable naval presence in the northern Pacific.

  · · ·

  Ernest Rutherford, the young scientist from the southern Pacific, settled in happily at McGill. He enjoyed his first winter, breathing in the glacial air, walking on the frozen St. Lawrence River, and watching huge chunks of ice being cut and stored, ready for sale when summer came. In 1900, the year of the Boxer Rebellion, he was able finally to go to New Zealand and wed Mary. They set up house in Montreal. A piece of student doggerel:

  Ernest Rutherford

  Ernie R-th-rf-rd, though he's no fool,

  In his lectures can never keep cool,...

  suggests that Rutherford did not always find it easy to deal with less gifted undergraduates. Nevertheless, he and Mary welcomed research student
s to tea. It was a friendly atmosphere where Rutherford talked and blew clouds of smoke from the ubiquitous pipe that Mary reluctantly but indulgently allowed him to smoke. As a letter to her from Rutherford in 1896 shows, she had initially been strongly opposed to the habit. Rutherford pleaded: "A good long time ago, I gave you a promise I would not smoke . . . 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 fidgetting. If I took to smoking occasionally, it would keep me anchored a bit and generally make me keep quieter. . . . Every scientific man ought to smoke, as he has to have the patience of a dozen Jobs in research work." There was, however, no whiskey or wine. One young man recalled regretfully that "in the Rutherford household alcohol was regarded with suspicion."

  Nineteen hundred was also the year that Rutherford made the first in a chain of discoveries that would challenge the accepted laws of chemistry and establish his reputation. While investigating the properties of the heavy element thorium, he identified a mysterious discharge, or "emanation," whose radioactivity reduced "in a geometrical progression with time." In this case it declined to half its original value in sixty seconds and by half of that half-value in the next sixty seconds, so that after two minutes only a quarter of the original activity remained and after three minutes only one eighth. By inspired but careful experimentation he had uncovered a phenomenon at the very core of radioactivity: the haf-lfe.

  The timely arrival at McGill of the English chemist Frederick Soddy gave Rutherford a partner to help analyze the chemical significance of his findings. Initially the two young men sparred. At a meeting of the Physical Society chaired by Rutherford, the subject for debate was "the existence of bodies smaller than an atom." Soddy's paper "Chemical Evidence of the Indivisibility of the Atom" lambasted physicists like J. J. Thomson for unjustifiably attacking classical atomic theory. Soddy's passion surprised Rutherford but, impressed by the Englishman's intellect, he invited him to collaborate on examining the mysterious thorium emanation. Soddy agreed, recognizing Rutherford as "an indefatigable investigator guided by an unerring instinct for the relevant and important."