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
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,
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