Szilard, part of his continuing campaign to arm the decrepit Oxford science laboratory against its splendid Cambridge rival. Lindemann had made effective use in that campaign of the Nazi expulsion of the Jewish academics but had given as good as he got: immediately upon hearing of the civil service law he had gone to Imperial Chemical Industries and convinced its directors to establish a grant program, arguing that such an investment would be not charity but money well spent. ICI had already begun paying out its first grant on May 1, 1933, while Beveridge and Szilard were still laying plans. It was an ICI grant that Szilard missed winning the following August, perhaps because he had not yet accomplished his summer of impressive experiment at St. Bart's, but Lindemann was paying attention now.
The tall, handsome Englishman, forty-nine years old in 1935, had been born in Germany, at Baden-Baden, because his mother chose not to allow advanced pregnancy to interfere with a visit to that fashionable spa. To provide their son with an outstanding education his English parents had sent him to the
The Army's decision injured him deeply and may have changed his life. He had served as a co-secretary to the 1911 Solvay Conference, standing up proudly with Nernst, Rutherford, Planck, Einstein, Mme. Curie, but even before that youthful apotheosis Nernst had predicted difficulty: “If your father were not such a rich man,” the blunt German had said, “you would become a great physicist.” When the Army questioned Lindemann's patriotism, writes a refugee colleague, “he became withdrawn to avoid exposing himself to slights and insults. Secretiveness about his personal life developed into a mania and he discouraged personal approaches by a stand-offishness which was easily mistaken for arrogance.” Lindemann retreated from original work and became a talented administrator, “the Prof,” an “unbending Victorian gentleman,” always impeccable in bowler hat, summer gray suit, winter dark suit, rolled-up umbrella and long, dark coat. If he could not win a uniform he would adopt one of his own.
He worked for his country during the war at the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough, designing what are now called avionics and doing aeronautical research. Tailspins were recognized maneuvers in air fighting by 1916, a good way to shake off an attacker. Lindemann was the first to study them scientifically. To do so he took flying lessons — only changing from civilian clothes to flying clothes on the runway beside the plane — then coolly flew spin after spin, memorizing his instrument readings as he plummeted and writing them down after he had recovered level flight.
After the war Lindemann accepted appointment to an Oxford still donnishly disdainful of science. He escaped from that further condescension, says his colleague, into “gracious living,” enjoying weekends with the nobility that were seldom vouchsafed to less well-born Oxford dons. By then a Rolls-Royce was part of his regalia. In June 1921, on a weekend at the country estate of the Duke and Duchess of Westminster, Lindemann met Winston Churchill, twelve years his senior. “The two men, so different in background and character, took to each other immediately and their acquaintance soon turned into a close friendship.” Churchill recalled that he “saw a great deal of Frederick Lindemann” during the 1930s. “Lindemann was already an old friend of mine… We came much closer from 1932 onwards, and he frequently motored over from Oxford to stay with me at Chartwell. Here we had many talks into the small hours of the morning about the dangers which seemed to be gathering upon us. Lindemann… became my chief adviser on the scientific aspects of modern war.”
To this illustrious personage, a vegetarian who daily consumed copious quantities of olive oil and Port Salut, Szilard turned in the early summer of 1935 to discuss “the question whether or not the liberation of nuclear energy… can be achieved in the immediate future.” If “double neutrons” could be produced, Szilard wrote Lindemann on June 3, “then it is certainly less bold to expect this achievement in the immediate future than to believe the opposite.” That meant trouble, Szilard thought, if Germany achieved a chain reaction first, and he argued for “an attempt, whatever small chance of success it may have… to control this development as long as possible.” Secrecy was the way to achieve such control: first, by winning agreement from the scientists involved to restrict publication, and second, by taking out patents.
Michael Polanyi had cautioned Szilard late in 1934 that “there is an opposition to you on account of taking patents.” The British scientific tradition that opposed patents assumed that those who filed them did so for mercenary purposes; Szilard explained his patents to Lindemann to clear his name:
Early in March last year it seemed advisable to envisage the possibility that… the release of large amounts of energy… might be imminent. Realising to what extent this hinges on the “double neutron,” I have applied for a patent along these lines… Obviously it would be misplaced to consider patents in this field private property and pursue them with a view to commercial exploitation for private purposes. When the time is ripe some suitable body will have to be created to ensure their proper use.
For the time being, Szilard proposed to work at Oxford on finding his “double neutrons,” possibly raising ?1,000 on the side “from private persons” so that he could hire a helper or two. To bait Lindemann's Clarendon ambitions, he argued in conclusion that “this type of work could greatly accelerate the building up of nuclear physics at Oxford.” As indeed, had it gone forward, it might have done.
When he learned, possibly from Lindemann, that he could keep his patents secret only by assigning them to some appropriate agency of the British government, Szilard offered them first to the War Office. Director of Artillery J. Coombes turned them down on October 8, noting that “there appears to be no reason to keep the specification secret so far as the War Department is concerned.” If Lindemann heard of the rejection he must have remembered his own rejection by the Army in 1915. The following February 1936, he intervened on Szilard1 s behalf with the Admiralty, Churchill's old bailiwick, writing the head of the Department of Scientific Research and Development cannily:
I daresay you remember my ringing you up about a man working here who had a patent which he thought ought to be kept secret. I enclose a letter from him on the subject as you suggested. I am naturally somewhat less optimistic about the prospects than the inventor, but he is a very good physicist and even if the chances were a hundred to one against it seems to me it might be worth keeping the thing secret as it is not going to cost the Government anything.
The patent, Szilard explained in the letter Lindemann enclosed, “contains information which could be used in the construction of explosive bodies… very many thousand times more powerful than ordinary bombs.” He was concerned about “the disasters which could be caused by their use on the part of certain Powers which might attack this country.” Wisely and withal inexpensively the Admiralty accepted the patent into its safekeeping.
Eight months in Copenhagen had suited Edward Teller. He met George Gamow on the Odessan's last visit there, after the Solvay Conference of the previous autumn; the two of them roared across Denmark and back during Easter vacation on Gamow's motorcycle, working over a problem in quantum mechanics. The Rockefeller Foundation did not approve of marriage during a fellowship period, but James Franck had interceded on his behalf and Teller had married his childhood sweetheart, Mici Harkanyi, in Budapest on February 26. He had also written an important paper. He returned to London with Mici in the summer of 1934 with his reputation enhanced and again took up his lectureship at University College. Assuming they would settle in England, the Tellers signed a nine-year lease just before Christmas on a pleasant three-room flat.
Two offers arrived in January, one of which changed Teller's mind. The first was from Princeton: a lectureship. The second was from Gamow: a full professorship at George Washington University. GWU wanted to strengthen its physics department; Gamow wanted company and liked Teller's verve.
Teller was twenty-six years old and a newlywed. He was less than sure about living in the United States, but a full professorship was not something he could sensibly refuse. His wife found someone to sublet the flat. The U.S. State Department refused nonquota immigration visas because Teller had only taught for one year — the Copenhagen time counted merely as a fellowship — and was required to have taught for two. He had not, however, tried for visas on the Hungarian immigration quota because he assumed the quota was full. In fact there was room. The Tellers followed the Gamows across the Atlantic in August 1935.
