The World Set Free | Page 8

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