Apart from this "slump" and the period 1909-1910 during which BBB will come to work with Rutherford in Manchester , they will wrtite each other a profuse amount of letters, collected in a volume entitled Rutherford and Boltwood: letters on radioactivity .
As the title indicates, these letters allowed the two scientists to share their results and their ideas concerning their field of research. But they also included personal reflections and commented on the work of their colleagues. These passages are a valuable source for my biography of Rutherford. I find concrete and personal details there, but I can also identify more precisely the state of mind of my central character, his best friend and those they evoke.
I will not detail this here, so I will only emphasize the humor of the two friends. The most talented was arguably BBB, champion of the sharp formula and and adept of acidic irony. Almost all the physicists and chemists of the time, including Marie Curie, received their share of sarcasm "made in Yale".
Thus by skipping the "technical" passages, the book Letters on radioactivity frequently gives a smile. And it allows me to draw something to breathe more life into my novel.