Ernest Rutherford
Posted: Sat Feb 13, 2010 11:40 pm
I've just finished a biography of Ernest Rutherford written by David Wilson. It's a semi-formidable tome of 600+ pages and somewhat tedious for me because the author is British. I spent a lot of time with the dictionary close at hand. This may have added considerably to the reading time, but the crop of new words was well worth it. I'll try some of them out on you guys as the need fits.
As an illustration of just one of the astonishing revelations presented:
". . . In accordance with the Rutherford tradition, most students went first to the training course in radioactive methods, the nursery, up in the attic of the Cavendish. And just as in the Manchester days, most beginners worked with radon sources in small glass capsules "precariously sealed off". Devons recalls that he "was strongly advised not to get the stuff on my skin or in my lungs". But he was even more strongly warned against contaminating the laboratory and ruining other people’s experiments, and it seems that the precaution of wearing rubber gloves, washing hands and changing coats was aimed more against contamination of the laboratory than of the person: " Inside the radium sanctuary itself (the tower room at the top of the lab) the residual activity was so high from contamination everywhere and from the residues of innumerable sources of the past that it was difficult to charge up the gold-leaf electroscope for long enough to measure, even roughly, the strength of a newly prepared source of some 100 millicuries."
"It throws our present-day concern with the slightest threat of radioactivity into some perspective to read that Devons regularly walked about with radioactive sources contained in no more that a glass tube with a rubber bung in his pocket, and he adds, "Nor was I myself unduly alarmed when, shortly after a visit to the Tower (where I spent a couple of hours each day) I found that by simply blowing on a Geiger counter its register would rattle furiously or completely choke in an attempt to record the activity. After a day or two of radioactive abstinence my breath always returned to normal."
This is an anecdote from Sam Devons. He lived to be 92! This is not an isolated situation. Remember that all the other students were in the same labs, some for many years.
Here's my favorite quote from the book "I am sorry for the poor fellows who haven't got a lab to work in." E. Rutherford.
As an illustration of just one of the astonishing revelations presented:
". . . In accordance with the Rutherford tradition, most students went first to the training course in radioactive methods, the nursery, up in the attic of the Cavendish. And just as in the Manchester days, most beginners worked with radon sources in small glass capsules "precariously sealed off". Devons recalls that he "was strongly advised not to get the stuff on my skin or in my lungs". But he was even more strongly warned against contaminating the laboratory and ruining other people’s experiments, and it seems that the precaution of wearing rubber gloves, washing hands and changing coats was aimed more against contamination of the laboratory than of the person: " Inside the radium sanctuary itself (the tower room at the top of the lab) the residual activity was so high from contamination everywhere and from the residues of innumerable sources of the past that it was difficult to charge up the gold-leaf electroscope for long enough to measure, even roughly, the strength of a newly prepared source of some 100 millicuries."
"It throws our present-day concern with the slightest threat of radioactivity into some perspective to read that Devons regularly walked about with radioactive sources contained in no more that a glass tube with a rubber bung in his pocket, and he adds, "Nor was I myself unduly alarmed when, shortly after a visit to the Tower (where I spent a couple of hours each day) I found that by simply blowing on a Geiger counter its register would rattle furiously or completely choke in an attempt to record the activity. After a day or two of radioactive abstinence my breath always returned to normal."
This is an anecdote from Sam Devons. He lived to be 92! This is not an isolated situation. Remember that all the other students were in the same labs, some for many years.
Here's my favorite quote from the book "I am sorry for the poor fellows who haven't got a lab to work in." E. Rutherford.