Abstract
“The Great War” of 1914–1918 had a significant impact on the usual activities of the Cavendish Laboratory. During that war, the Cavendish virtually ceased its two basic functions of research and teaching. Military personnel were billeted in some areas of the Cavendish, and its workshops and workmen were employed in the production of various gauges. Most researchers left the Cavendish early in the war to fight Germans. Those who remained left the Cavendish later to participate in warrelated scientific research, principally at naval research centers and the National Physical Laboratory. The Cavendish then was maintained by few crippled researchers, senior demonstrators, and some foreign visitors.
Your own work in theoretical and experimental science has been monumental; but your giving to the world so many leading physicists seems a work as unique and farreaching.
L. L. Campbell
No one knows better than I how second-rate any man must feel who succeeds to your chair. In fact I think that will be its greatest drawback; your successor will by this circumstance be kept in a very humble frame of mind, if not an unhappy one.
C. G Barkla
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Reference
CUL MSS ADD 7654 C7 (27 November 1926 ): L.L. Campbell to J.J. for celebrating his seventieth birthday.
CUL MSS ADD 7654 B18 (11 March 1919): Barkla to J.J.
Strutt, Life ofJ.J. Thomson, 176–178.
G. M. Caroe, William Henry Bragg, 1862–1942: Man and Scientist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978 ), 79.
John L. Heilbron, H. G. J Moseley: The Life and Letters of an English Physicist, 1887–1915 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974 ).
Ibid., 124–125.
For the activities of B. I. R., sec J.J. Thomson, Recollections, 206–224.
CUL MSS ADD 7654 Gov. 13 (or C40: 2 December 1915): the First Lord of Admiralty to the Secretary of the B. I. R. Brackets added.
CUL MSS ADD 7654 Gov. 1 (or C34: 5 August 1915 ): J.J. to T. E. Crease.
CUL MSS ADD 7654 E2 (20 August 1915 ): W. H. Eccles to J.J.
CUL MSS ADD 7654 Gov. 9 (or C39: 9 October ny): T. E. Crease to J.J.
CUL MSS ADD 7654 D33 (25 November 1915 ): J. J. E. Durack to J.J.
For Henry Bragg’s activities during the war, see Caroe, William Henry Bragg, 79–92. The early report on the anti-submarine project indicates many difficulties in developing effective equipment. See CUL MSS ADD 7654 Gov. 20 (C42A), a classified document stamped of “secret.”
CUL MSS ADD 7654 R70 (13 October 1915): Rutherford to J.J.
CUL MSS ADD 7654 F12, R74, R76, Gov. 36, and M31.
John Terraine, The U-Boat Wars, 1916–1945 ( New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1989 ), 29.
CUR (14 November 1916): 219. For the report on the degrees for research, see CUR (6 October 1916): 50–51.
Strutt, Life of J.J. Thomson, 205.
Ibid., 208. For the details of the ceremonies, the congratulatory notes, and other stories about the Mastership, see also ibid., 205–214.
CUL MSS ADD 7653 T28 (18 December 1906 ): J.J. to Rutherford.
CUR (4 March 1919): 495.
For Larmor’s role in the election, see David Wilson, Rutherford: Simple Genius ( Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983 ), 408–412.
CUL MSS ADD 7653 T43 (7 March 1919): Rutherford to J.J.
CUL MSS ADD 7653 T44 (10 March 1919 ): J.J. to Rutherford.
CUL MSS ADD 7653 S43 (15 March 1919): Rutherford to Schuster. This letter was published in Mark Oliphant, Rutherford: Recollections of the Cambridge Days ( Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1972 ), 16.
Oliphant, ibid., 17.
CUL MSS ADD 7653 T46 (23 March 1919 ): J.J. to Rutherford.
L. Badash, Rutherford and Boltwood, 322, 336, 351.
For the history of the Cavendish Laboratory under Rutherford, see Oliphant, Rutherford: Recollections; Crowther, The Cavendish Laboratory, 176–268; J. Hendry (ed.), Cambridge Physics in the Thirties (Bristol: Adam Hilger, 1984 ); and Jeffrey A. Hughes, The Radioactivists: Community, Controversy and the Rise of Nuclear Physics unpublished Ph.D. dissertation ( Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 1993 ).
E. Segrè, From X-rays to Quarks: Modern Physicists and Their Discoveries ( New York: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1980 ), 113.
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© 2002 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Kim, DW. (2002). The End of an Era, 1914–1919. In: Leadership and Creativity. Archimedes, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2055-7_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2055-7_6
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