THE ARTIST AND THE ATOM — BLANC 431 



Artists have hopelessly lost their way in recent years due to physics, chemistry, 

 mechanics and the study of nature. Having lost their primitive force, and 

 being out of touch with their instincts, one might say with their imaginations, 

 they have pursued a hundred paths in search of productive elements which they 

 lacked the strength to create themselves. 



But this rebellion was doomed to failure, for already by 1903 science 

 was well on the way to developing new "productive elements" to fire 

 the artist's imagination. 



The new development began with the work of Henri Becquerel in 

 France in 1895. Becquerel, and later the Curies, discovered that 

 uranium, radium, and certain other minerals emitted invisible rays 

 which could move through space and penetrate various materials, even 

 affecting and destroying living tissues. Experiments with these 

 alpha, beta, and gamma rays led to the conclusion that they were 

 actually particles of some kind, a stream of infinitesimally tiny bullets 

 shooting through space. Further experiments led to the discovery 

 that radiation of this sort ultimately caused the element radium to 

 transmute itself in a series of stages to the element lead. Now to 

 transform an element is to transform its components, i. e., its atoms. 

 Consequently the physicists were forced to the revolutionary con- 

 clusion that the atom was not the imperishable, indivisible billiard 

 ball, which the nineteenth century had supposed it to be, but was 

 actually composed of multiple and divisible constituents. 



Another line of research simultaneously being pureued by other 

 scientists related to the effects of passing electrical discharges through 

 gases. The famous X-ray was discovered by Konrad Rontgen in 

 Germany in 1895, and during the next few years the Englishman J. J. 

 Thompson conducted a series of experiments with cathode tubes, 

 finally reaching the conclusion that electricity itself consisted of infini- 

 tesimal particles (now known as electrons) 1,8-10 times lighter than 

 the lightest known atom, that of the element hydrogen. In 1899 

 Thompson published his conclusions, saying : 



I regard the atom as containing a large number of smaller bodies which I will 

 call corpuscles. ... In the normal atom, this assemblage of corpuscles forms 

 a system which is electrically neutral. . . . Electrification of a gas I regard as 

 due to the splitting up of some of the atoms of the gas resulting in the detach- 

 ment of a corpuscle from some of the atoms. ... On this view, electrification 

 essentially involves the splitting up of the atom, a part of the mass of the atom 

 getting free and becoming detached from the original atom. [Philosophical 

 Magazine, ser. 5, vol. 68, p. 565.] 



Thus by the end of the nineteenth century these two lines of experi- 

 ment had independently resulted in the conclusion that the atom was 

 not the ultimate form of matter but was itself composed of smaller 

 subatomic particles, although the manner in which the constituent 

 parts of the atom were associated was still unknown. 



