up the periodic table, one step at a time. He devised a little staircase of strips of film by matching up the lines. He wrote to Bohr on November 16: “During the last fortnight or so I have been getting results which will interest you… So far I have dealt with the K [spectral line] series from Calcium to Zinc… The results are exceedingly simple and largely what you would expect… K = N — 1, very exactly, N being the atomic number.”
He had calcium at 20, scandium at 21, titanium at 22, vanadium at 23, chromium at 24 and so on up to zinc at 30. He concludes that his results “lend great weight to the general principles which you use, and I am delighted that this is so, as your theory is having a splendid effect on Physics.” Harry Moseley's crisp work gave experimental confirmation of the Bohr-Rutherford atom that was far more solidly acceptable than Marsden's and Geiger's alpha- scattering experiments. “Because you see,” Bohr said in his last interview, “actually the Rutherford work was not taken seriously. We cannot understand today, but it was not taken seriously at all… The great change came from Moseley.”
Otto Hahn was called upon once more to demonstrate his radioactive preparations. In the early spring of 1914 the Bayer Dye Works at Leverkusen, near Cologne in the Rhineland, gave a reception to celebrate the opening of a large lecture hall. Germany's chemical industry led the world and Bayer was the largest chemical company in Germany, with more than ten thousand employees. It manufactured some two thousand different dye-stuffs, large tonnages of inorganic chemicals, a range of pharmaceuticals. The firm's managing director, Carl Duisberg, a chemist who preferred industrial management along American lines, had invited the
Hahn lectured to the dignitaries on radioactivity. Near the beginning of the lecture he wrote Duisberg's name on a sealed photographic plate with a small glass tube filled with strong mesothorium. Technicians developed the plate while he spoke; at the end Hahn projected the radiographic signature onto a screen to appreciative applause.
The high point of the celebration at the vast 900-acre chemical complex came in the evening. “In the evening there was a banquet,” Hahn remembered with nostalgia; “everything was exquisite. On each of the little tables there was a beautiful orchid, brought from Holland by air.” Orchids delivered by swift biplane might be adequate symbols of German prosperity and power in 1914, but the managing director wanted to demonstrate German technological superiority as well, and found exotic statement: “At many of the tables,” says Hahn, evoking an unrecognizably futuristic past, “the wine was cooled by means of liquid air in thermos vessels.”
When war broke out Niels and Harald Bohr were hiking in the Austrian Alps, covering as much as twenty-two miles a day. “It is impossible to describe how amazing and wonderful it is,” Niels had written to Margrethe along the way, “when the fog on the mountains suddenly comes driving down from all the peaks, initially as quite small clouds, finally to fill the whole valley.” The brothers had planned to return home August 6; the war suddenly came driving down like the mountain fog and they rushed across Germany before the frontiers closed. In October Bohr would sail with his wife from neutral Denmark to teach for two years at Manchester. Rutherford, his boys off to war work, needed help.
Harry Moseley was in Australia with his mother at the beginning of August, attending the 1914 British Association meeting, in his spare time searching out the duck-billed platypus and picturesque silver mines. The patriotism of the Australians, who immediately began mobilizing, triggered his own Etonian spirit of loyalty to King and country. He sailed for England as soon as he could book passage. By late October he had gingered up a reluctant recruiting officer to arrange his commission as a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers ahead of the waiting list.
Chaim Weizmann, the tall, sturdy, Russian-born Jewish biochemist who was Ernest Rutherford's good friend at Manchester, was a passionate Zionist at a time when many, including many influential British Jews, believed Zionism to be at least visionary and naive if not wrongheaded, fanatic, even a menace. But if Weizmann was a Zionist he was also deeply admiring of British democracy, and one of his first acts after the beginning of the war was to cut himself off from the international Zionist organization because it proposed to remain neutral. Its European leaders hated Czarist Russia, England's ally, and so did Weizmann, but unlike them he did not believe that Germany in cultural and technological superiority would win the war. He believed that the Western democracies would emerge victorious and that Jewish destiny lay with them.
He, his wife and his young son had been en route to a holiday in Switzerland at the outbreak of the war. They worked their way back to Paris, where he visited the elderly Baron Edmond de Rothschild, financial mainstay of the pioneering Jewish agricultural settlements in Palestine. To Weizmann's astonishment Rothschild shared his optimism about the eventual outcome of the war and its possibilities for Jewry. Though Weizmann had no official position in the Zionist movement, Rothschild urged him to seek out and talk to British leaders.
That matched his own inclinations. His hope of British influence had deep roots. He was the third child among fifteen of a timber merchant who assembled rafts of logs and floated them down the Vistula to Danzig for milling and export. The Weizmanns lived in that impoverished western region of Russia cordoned off for the Jews known as the Pale of Settlement. When Chaim was only eleven he had written a letter that prefigured his work in the war. “The eleven-year-old boy,” reports his biographer Isaiah Berlin, “says that the kings and nations of the world are plainly set upon the ruin of the Jewish nation; the Jews must not let themselves be destroyed; England alone may help them to return and rise again in their ancient land of Palestine.”
Young Weizmann's conviction drove him inexorably west. At eighteen he floated on one of his father's rafts to West Prussia, worked his way to Berlin and studied at the Technische Hochschule. In 1899 he took his Ph.D. at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, then sold a patent to Bayer that considerably improved his finances. He moved to England in 1904, a move he thought “a deliberate and desperate step… I was in danger of degenerating into a
Returning to Manchester from France in late August 1914, Weizmann found a circular on his desk from the British War Office “inviting every scientist in possession of any discovery of military value to report it.” He possessed such a discovery and forthwith offered it to the War Office “without remuneration.” The War Office chose not to reply. Weizmann went on with his research. At the same time he began the approach to British leaders that he and Rothschild had discussed that would elaborate into some two thousand interviews before the end of the war.
Weizmann's discovery was a bacillus and a process. The bacillus was
That creature of serendipity was B-Y. Mixed with a mash of cooked corn it fermented the mash into a solution of water and three solvents — one part ethyl alcohol, three parts acetone, six parts butyl alcohol (butanol). The three solvents could then be separated by straightforward distillation. Weizmann tried developing a process for making synthetic rubber from butanol and succeeded. In the meantime, in the years just prior to the beginning of the war, the price of natural rubber fell and the clamor for synthetic rubber stilled.
Pursuing his efforts toward a Jewish homeland, Weizmann acquired in Manchester a loyal and influential friend, C. P. Scott, the tall, elderly, liberal editor of the
