December 13, 1917] 



NATURE 



297 



ijxperiments of Hertz, and the advent of prac- 

 tical wireless telegraphy, and when it came 

 all the three original investigators were dead; 

 \et, unless these three great men had evolved 

 their brilliant ideas and worked them out as 

 ;hey did, wireless telegraphy had never been. How 

 difficult it is for the uninitiated to realise the importance 

 and the practical potentialities of some discoveries in 

 physics at the moment of their birth may be made 

 plain by a few words about the remarkable develop- 

 ments that have taken place during the past few years 

 in that department of science known as molecular 

 physics. Up to comparatively recently the theory of 

 the atomic structure of matter, and the idea of the 

 indestructibility of the atom, that smallest materia! 

 particle that was thought possible to exist, still, held 

 its own. First enunciated more than two thousand 

 years ago by the Greek Democritus, developed later 

 by another Greek philosopher, Epicurus, and popu- 

 larised by the Roman poet Lucretius in his celebrated 

 poem, "De Xatura Rerum," this theory of 

 matter was put on a proper scientific basis by 

 the English chemist Dalton rather more than 

 one hundred years ago. Quickly following the 

 discovery of the X-rays by Prof. Rontgen in 1895, and 

 of radio-activity by Prof. iBecquerel a few months- later, 

 came a most surprising development- — indeed, one of 

 the most remaikable in the whole history of science. 

 Mainly owing to the labours of Sir Joseph Thomson 

 and his Cambridge school of experimenters, starting 

 from the previous researches of Sir William Crookes, 

 we now know that the atoms, once called the ultimate 

 atoms, so far from being the indivisible entities as was 

 once thought, are, each individual one of them, some- 

 thing very like a complete solar system, comprising a 

 positively electrified sun or nucleus and a number of 

 negatively electrified electrons or planets. More than 

 this, though the whole atom is so small that it is quite 

 invisible to the most powerful microscope, and that it 

 would take at least three million atoms, perhaps ten 

 or twenty times as many, set close together in a 

 straight line, to cover a single inch, the constituent 

 electrons are so much smaller that, though contained 

 within the compass of the atom, they are as distant 

 from one another, relatively to their size, certainly as 

 are the earth and the moon, and possibly as the sun 

 and the planets. The imagination reels at such an 

 illustration of the microcosm of the infinitely small, 

 just as it reels at the macrocosm of infinitely large 

 astronomical space and its population of innumerable 

 stars ; but in Nature, as has been truly said, the adjec- 

 tives " large " and " small " have no meaning. In Nature 

 there is nothing absolutely great, and there is nothing 

 absolutely little. Whether it be a matter of the dimen- 

 sions of space or of the lapse of time, all is relative. 

 To us humans space is measured in terms relative to 

 the dimensions of our bodies, time in periods relative 

 to the duration of our lives. To us things appear 

 large or small, periods long or short, but these are 

 appearances only, and have no absolute reality. 



Now- to those who have not studied the question all 

 this must seem very remote from the practical politics 

 of applied science, such as we make use of in our daily 

 life. But it is not so, for it is to these almost infinitely 

 small negative electrons that we owe the Rontgen rays. 

 When propelled at the incredible velocity of something 

 like fifty thousand miles per second, which thev 

 attain under electrical stimulation inside a Crookes 

 vacuum tube, and caused to bombard a piece of metal, 

 they create these rays in much the same way as the 

 bullets from a machine-gun may rattle on a target and 

 thus create sound. The Rontgen rays themselves are 

 a description of light which, until artificially produced 

 by man in the manner described, had never been ob- 

 served in Nature, and, indeed, had perhaps never pre- 

 NO. 251 1, VOL. 100] 



I viously existed in the whole history of the universe. 

 I Their practical utility is, however, now universally 

 realised, and in surgery and medicine they are in every- 

 j day demand. 



' Now, not only have these abstruse and seemingly 

 ! quite academic discoveries about the electrical structure 

 I of the atom, and the properties of its constituent parts, 

 I brought about great improvements during the last few 

 years in the design and use of Rontgen-ray tubes, but 

 they have also borne practical fruit in other directions, 

 as, for instance, in what is to-day much the most 

 sensitive and trustworthy apparatus for receiving wire- 

 less telegraph signals. Their further utility, moreover, 

 is just now beginning to make itself apparent, and 

 quite recently they have been applied by Sir Joseph 

 Thomson to an entirely novel form of chemical 

 analysis, the possibilities of which it is as yet too 

 early to estimate. Anyway, we see how in a space of 

 only about twenty years discoveries of apparently 

 purely academic interest, in perhaps the most abstruse 

 of all lines of scientific investigation, are already be- 

 ginning to be usefully applied. We see how the func- 

 tion of science to be utilitarian obtains just as much 

 in the case of highly recondite investigations as in 

 those that are more simple and in which the practical 

 applications are more obvious. 



It is impossible to study the history of civilisation 

 without recognising that scientific research and inven- 

 tion, with their innumerable and incalculable actions 

 and reactions, constitute the soul of industrial pro- 

 gress. Consequently, if this progress is to be main- 

 tained, every inducement must be provided to en- 

 courage those W'ho are capable of carrying on the work. 

 Since the beginning of the world it is not to the 

 masses, but to the few exceptional individuals that all 

 great advances have been due, and it is greatly to be 

 deprecated that politicians, who must, or, at any rate, 

 should, know better, continue to flatter the so-called 

 working-man by telling him that he alone is the creator 

 of wealth. To those who know the facts such a sug- 

 gestion is, of course, absurd. Still, it is highly neces- 

 sary that the masses should be educated to learn that 

 unless those who have the requisite capacity are 

 afforded the necessary leisure and facilities to work at 

 research and invention, industries can be neither de- 

 veloped nor even maintained in the face of the world's 

 competition, and that the working-man himself will 

 be the principal sufferer from the resulting stagnation 

 and decay. 



It is unfortunate that in this country of late years 

 it has become a fashion to consider the making of 

 large profits as almost a crime, for the w^orking out 

 of manv industrial scientific processes and inventions 

 can be ' accomplished only by great and prolonged 

 expenditure and the risking of vast sums of money, 

 such as only very rich persons or companies can afford. 

 The history of the fine chemical trade in Germany for 

 some vears before the war is a good case in point. 

 Here verv large sums were in some instances spent 

 on the development of special processes. In many 

 cases the money w-as lost, but the few speculations of 

 this nature that succeeded recouped all that had been 

 spent on the others, a single product in some instances 

 bringing in an enormous net annual profit. This, 

 again, enabled other similar problems to be attacked. 

 With our system of taxation — income tax and super- 

 tax, and now excess profits tax in addition, and the 

 jealousv and outcry that the making of large profits 

 eftgenders — it is very difficult to arrive at such results 

 in this country, and this undoubtedly is one of the 

 main reasons for our backwardness in diverse direc- 

 tions. A remedy should be found in exempting from 

 taxation all money spent in new scientific develop- 

 ments. Otherwise, with stinted resources, we cannot 

 expect to maintain our position. 



