The World Set Free, Page 3

culminating exercise of his intelligence and his intellectual

  courage. The air of 'Nunc Dimittis' sounds in same of these

  writings. 'The great things are discovered,' wrote Gerald Brown

  in his summary of the nineteenth century. 'For us there remains

  little but the working out of detail.' The spirit of the seeker

  was still rare in the world; education was unskilled,

  unstimulating, scholarly, and but little valued, and few people

  even then could have realised that Science was still but the

  flimsiest of trial sketches and discovery scarcely beginning. No

  one seems to have been afraid of science and its possibilities.

  Yet now where there had been but a score or so of seekers, there

  were many thousands, and for one needle of speculation that had

  been probing the curtain of appearances in 1800, there were now

  hundreds. And already Chemistry, which had been content with her

  atoms and molecules for the better part of a century, was

  preparing herself for that vast next stride that was to

  revolutionise the whole life of man from top to bottom.

  One realises how crude was the science of that time when one

  considers the case of the composition of air. This was

  determined by that strange genius and recluse, that man of

  mystery, that disembowelled intelligence, Henry Cavendish,

  towards the end of the eighteenth century. So far as he was

  concerned the work was admirably done. He separated all the known

  ingredients of the air with a precision altogether remarkable; he

  even put it upon record that he had some doubt about the purity

  of the nitrogen. For more than a hundred years his determination

  was repeated by chemists all the world over, his apparatus was

  treasured in London, he became, as they used to say, 'classic,'

  and always, at every one of the innumerable repetitions of his

  experiment, that sly element argon was hiding among the nitrogen

  (and with a little helium and traces of other substances, and

  indeed all the hints that might have led to the new departures of

  the twentieth-century chemistry), and every time it slipped

  unobserved through the professorial fingers that repeated his

  procedure.

  Is it any wonder then with this margin of inaccuracy, that up to

  the very dawn of the twentieth-century scientific discovery was

  still rather a procession of happy accidents than an orderly

  conquest of nature?

  Yet the spirit of seeking was spreading steadily through the

  world. Even the schoolmaster could not check it. For the mere

  handful who grew up to feel wonder and curiosity about the

  secrets of nature in the nineteenth century, there were now, at

  the beginning of the twentieth, myriads escaping from the

  limitations of intellectual routine and the habitual life, in

  Europe, in America, North and South, in Japan, in China, and all

  about the world.

  It was in 1910 that the parents of young Holsten, who was to be

  called by a whole generation of scientific men, 'the greatest of

  European chemists,' were staying in a villa near Santo Domenico,

  between Fiesole and Florence. He was then only fifteen, but he

  was already distinguished as a mathematician and possessed by a

  savage appetite to understand. He had been particularly attracted

  by the mystery of phosphorescence and its apparent unrelatedness

  to every other source of light. He was to tell afterwards in his

  reminiscences how he watched the fireflies drifting and glowing

  among the dark trees in the garden of the villa under the warm

  blue night sky of Italy; how he caught and kept them in cages,

  dissected them, first studying the general anatomy of insects

  very elaborately, and how he began to experiment with the effect

  of various gases and varying temperature upon their light. Then

  the chance present of a little scientific toy invented by Sir

  William Crookes, a toy called the spinthariscope, on which radium

  particles impinge upon sulphide of zinc and make it luminous,

  induced him to associate the two sets of phenomena. It was a

  happy association for his inquiries. It was a rare and fortunate

  thing, too, that any one with the mathematical gift should have

  been taken by these curiosities.

  Section 8

  And while the boy Holsten was mooning over his fireflies at

  Fiesole, a certain professor of physics named Rufus was giving a

  course of afternoon lectures upon Radium and Radio-Activity in

  Edinburgh. They were lectures that had attracted a very

  considerable amount of attention. He gave them in a small

  lecture-theatre that had become more and more congested as his

  course proceeded. At his concluding discussion it was crowded

  right up to the ceiling at the back, and there people were

  standing, standing without any sense of fatigue, so fascinating

  did they find his suggestions. One youngster in particular, a

  chuckle-headed, scrub-haired lad from the Highlands, sat hugging

  his knee with great sand-red hands and drinking in every word,

  eyes aglow, cheeks flushed, and ears burning.

  'And so,' said the professor, 'we see that this Radium, which

  seemed at first a fantastic exception, a mad inversion of all

  that was most established and fundamental in the constitution of

  matter, is really at one with the rest of the elements. It does

  noticeably and forcibly what probably all the other elements are

  doing with an imperceptible slowness. It is like the single

  voice crying aloud that betrays the silent breathing multitude in

  the darkness. Radium is an element that is breaking up and flying

  to pieces. But perhaps all elements are doing that at less

  perceptible rates. Uranium certainly is; thorium-the stuff of

  this incandescent gas mantle-certainly is; actinium. I feel

  that we are but beginning the list. And we know now that the

  atom, that once we thought hard and impenetrable, and indivisible

  and final and-lifeless-lifeless, is really a reservoir of

  immense energy. That is the most wonderful thing about all this

  work. A little while ago we thought of the atoms as we thought

  of bricks, as solid building material, as substantial matter, as

  unit masses of lifeless stuff, and behold! these bricks are

  boxes, treasure boxes, boxes full of the intensest force. This

  little bottle contains about a pint of uranium oxide; that is to

  say, about fourteen ounces of the element uranium. It is worth

  about a pound. And in this bottle, ladies and gentlemen, in the

  atoms in this bottle there slumbers at least as much energy as we

  could get by burning a hundred and sixty tons of coal. If at a

  word, in one instant I could suddenly release that energy here

  and now it would blow us and everything about us to fragments; if

  I could turn it into the machinery that lights this city, it

  could keep Edinburgh brightly lit for a week. But at present no

  man knows, no man has an inkling of how this little lump of stuff

  can be made to hasten the release of its store. It does release

  it, as a burn trickles. Slowly the uranium changes into radium,

  the rad
ium changes into a gas called the radium emanation, and

  that again to what we call radium A, and so the process goes on,

  giving out energy at every stage, until at last we reach the last

  stage of all, which is, so far as we can tell at present, lead.

  But we cannot hasten it.'

  'I take ye, man,' whispered the chuckle-headed lad, with his red

  hands tightening like a vice upon his knee. 'I take ye, man. Go

  on! Oh, go on!'

  The professor went on after a little pause. 'Why is the change

  gradual?' he asked. 'Why does only a minute fraction of the

  radium disintegrate in any particular second? Why does it dole

  itself out so slowly and so exactly? Why does not all the

  uranium change to radium and all the radium change to the next

  lowest thing at once? Why this decay by driblets; why not a decay

  en masse?… Suppose presently we find it is possible to

  quicken that decay?'

  The chuckle-headed lad nodded rapidly. The wonderful inevitable

  idea was coming. He drew his knee up towards his chin and swayed

  in his seat with excitement. 'Why not?' he echoed, 'why not?'

  The professor lifted his forefinger.

  'Given that knowledge,' he said, 'mark what we should be able to

  do! We should not only be able to use this uranium and thorium;

  not only should we have a source of power so potent that a man

  might carry in his hand the energy to light a city for a year,

  fight a fleet of battleships, or drive one of our giant liners

  across the Atlantic; but we should also have a clue that would

  enable us at last to quicken the process of disintegration in all

  the other elements, where decay is still so slow as to escape our

  finest measurements. Every scrap of solid matter in the world

  would become an available reservoir of concentrated force. Do

  you realise, ladies and gentlemen, what these things would mean

  for us?'

  The scrub head nodded. 'Oh! go on. Go on.'

  'It would mean a change in human conditions that I can only

  compare to the discovery of fire, that first discovery that

  lifted man above the brute. We stand to-day towards

  radio-activity as our ancestor stood towards fire before he had

  learnt to make it. He knew it then only as a strange thing

  utterly beyond his control, a flare on the crest of the volcano,

  a red destruction that poured through the forest. So it is that

  we know radio-activity to-day. This-this is the dawn of a new

  day in human living. At the climax of that civilisation which

  had its beginning in the hammered flint and the fire-stick of the

  savage, just when it is becoming apparent that our

  ever-increasing needs cannot be borne indefinitely by our present

  sources of energy, we discover suddenly the possibility of an

  entirely new civilisation. The energy we need for our very

  existence, and with which Nature supplies us still so grudgingly,

  is in reality locked up in inconceivable quantities all about us.

  We cannot pick that lock at present, but--'

  He paused. His voice sank so that everybody strained a little to

  hear him.

  '--we will.'

  He put up that lean finger again, his solitary gesture.

  'And then,' he said…

  'Then that perpetual struggle for existence, that perpetual

  struggle to live on the bare surplus of Nature's energies will

  cease to be the lot of Man. Man will step from the pinnacle of

  this civilisation to the beginning of the next. I have no

  eloquence, ladies and gentlemen, to express the vision of man's

  material destiny that opens out before me. I see the desert

  continents transformed, the poles no longer wildernesses of ice,

  the whole world once more Eden. I see the power of man reach out

  among the stars…'

  He stopped abruptly with a catching of the breath that many an

  actor or orator might have envied.

  The lecture was over, the audience hung silent for a few seconds,

  sighed, became audible, stirred, fluttered, prepared for

  dispersal. More light was turned on and what had been a dim mass

  of figures became a bright confusion of movement. Some of the

  people signalled to friends, some crowded down towards the

  platform to examine the lecturer's apparatus and make notes of

  his diagrams. But the chuckle-headed lad with the scrub hair

  wanted no such detailed frittering away of the thoughts that had

  inspired him. He wanted to be alone with them; he elbowed his way

  out almost fiercely, he made himself as angular and bony as a

  cow, fearing lest some one should speak to him, lest some one

  should invade his glowing sphere of enthusiasm.

  He went through the streets with a rapt face, like a saint who

  sees visions. He had arms disproportionately long, and

  ridiculous big feet.

  He must get alone, get somewhere high out of all this crowding of

  commonness, of everyday life.

  He made his way to the top of Arthur's Seat, and there he sat for

  a long time in the golden evening sunshine, still, except that

  ever and again he whispered to himself some precious phrase that

  had stuck in his mind.

  'If,' he whispered, 'if only we could pick that lock…'

  The sun was sinking over the distant hills. Already it was shorn

  of its beams, a globe of ruddy gold, hanging over the great banks

  of cloud that would presently engulf it.

  'Eh!' said the youngster. 'Eh!'

  He seemed to wake up at last out of his entrancement, and the red

  sun was there before his eyes. He stared at it, at first without

  intelligence, and then with a gathering recognition. Into his

  mind came a strange echo of that ancestral fancy, that fancy of a

  Stone Age savage, dead and scattered bones among the drift two

  hundred thousand years ago.

  'Ye auld thing,' he said-and his eyes were shining, and he made

  a kind of grabbing gesture with his hand; 'ye auld red thing…

  We'll have ye YET.'

  CHAPTER THE FIRST

  THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY

  Section I

  The problem which was already being mooted by such scientific men

  as Ramsay, Rutherford, and Soddy, in the very beginning of the

  twentieth century, the problem of inducing radio-activity in the

  heavier elements and so tapping the internal energy of atoms, was

  solved by a wonderful combination of induction, intuition, and

  luck by Holsten so soon as the year 1933. From the first

  detection of radio-activity to its first subjugation to human

  purpose measured little more than a quarter of a century. For

  twenty years after that, indeed, minor difficulties prevented any

  striking practical application of his success, but the essential

  thing was done, this new boundary in the march of human progress

  was crossed, in that year. He set up atomic disintegration in a

  minute particle of bismuth; it exploded with great violence into

  a heavy gas of extreme radio-activity, which disintegrated in its

  turn in the course of seven days, and it was only after another

  year's work that he was able to show practically that the last

  result of this rapid release of e
nergy was gold. But the thing

  was done-at the cost of a blistered chest and an injured finger,

  and from the moment when the invisible speck of bismuth flashed

  into riving and rending energy, Holsten knew that he had opened a

  way for mankind, however narrow and dark it might still be, to

  worlds of limitless power. He recorded as much in the strange

  diary biography he left the world, a diary that was up to that

  particular moment a mass of speculations and calculations, and

  which suddenly became for a space an amazingly minute and human

  record of sensations and emotions that all humanity might

  understand.

  He gives, in broken phrases and often single words, it is true,

  but none the less vividly for that, a record of the twenty-four

  hours following the demonstration of the correctness of his

  intricate tracery of computations and guesses. 'I thought I

  should not sleep,' he writes-the words he omitted are supplied

  in brackets-(on account of) 'pain in (the) hand and chest and

  (the) wonder of what I had done… Slept like a child.'

  He felt strange and disconcerted the next morning; he had nothing

  to do, he was living alone in apartments in Bloomsbury, and he

  decided to go up to Hampstead Heath, which he had known when he

  was a little boy as a breezy playground. He went up by the

  underground tube that was then the recognised means of travel

  from one part of London to another, and walked up Heath Street

  from the tube station to the open heath. He found it a gully of

  planks and scaffoldings between the hoardings of house-wreckers.

  The spirit of the times had seized upon that narrow, steep, and

  winding thoroughfare, and was in the act of making it commodious

  and interesting, according to the remarkable ideals of

  Neo-Georgian aestheticism. Such is the illogical quality of

  humanity that Holsten, fresh from work that was like a petard

  under the seat of current civilisation, saw these changes with

  regret. He had come up Heath Street perhaps a thousand times, had

  known the windows of all the little shops, spent hours in the

  vanished cinematograph theatre, and marvelled at the high-flung

  early Georgian houses upon the westward bank of that old gully of

  a thoroughfare; he felt strange with all these familiar things

  gone. He escaped at last with a feeling of relief from this