Characters in Rutherford's life
Joseph John Thomson (1856-1940)
Ernest Rutherford was the first foreign research student recruited by JJ Thomson in 1895. By betting on a New Zealander without any support in the Cambridgien world, "JJ" was making a risky gamble. The future showed him that it was also the best decision of his life.
Pictures:
JJ Thomson around 1915. Source: Wikipedia .
JJ Thomson with his son George and daughter Joan in 1909. Source: Science and Society Picture Library
Students of the Cavendish laboratory around JJ Thomson (1897). Source: Science Museum London
JJ Thomson in his research lab. Source: Rutherford's nuclear world , Center for History of Physics, American Institute of Physics
Cavendish Laboratory Staff and Research Students, 1933. Source: Researchgate
Joseph John Thomson and Ernest Rutherford at the Cavendish Lab in 1933. Source: University of Cambridge Digital Library .
Graves of Joseph John Thomson and Ernest Baron Rutherford of Nelson at Westminster Abbey - 1940s. Source: National Library of New Zealand .
Rose Elisabeth (née Paget), Lady Thomson by Olive Edis. Source: National Portrait Gallery, London
Grave of JJ and Rose Thomson in Westminster. Source: Sutori .
Covers of two books by Joan Charnock. Source: Abebooks and Goodreads
Thomson himself had had to fight for a place in Cambridge.
The son of a Manchester merchant, he did not have the pedigree of other applicants (including a certain Arthur Schuster ) when he proposed his candidacy for the head of the Cavendish laboratory, the department of applied physics at Cambridge University. Worse still, he had almost no experience in the activities of this laboratory, since he was neither a physicist nor an experimenter: he was a mathematician and he was handicapped by an awkwardness which made any manipulation of material hazardous.
He was however selected for the position, to the chagrin of some assistants already in place for years. He began in December 1884, succeeding two great names in science, James Clerk Maxwell and John William Strutt, third Baron Rayleigh .
In 1890, he married one of the researchers from his team, Rose Elizabeth Paget (1860-1951).
She put an end to her scientific career (since married women could not work), but kept one foot in the laboratory: every other Tuesday, JJ organized a colloquim in the large lecture theater of the Cavendish laboratory: the researchers presented their latest work and a tea was served at the end. Rose Thomson took care of the housekeeping so that no one ran out of tea and cupcakes. What a magnificent mission!
JJ and Rose would have had two children, George (1892-1975) and Joan (1903-1987).
When the possibility arose of recruiting foreign students, in 1895, Thomson did not hesitate for a second: it was for him an opportunity to diversify the profiles of the researchers in his team, by drawing some of the best elements available in other regions of the Empire; and it was also an opportunity to cut the cackle of the "pure" Cambridgians who had looked down on him when he himself had begun there.
So he brought into the Cavendish laboratory a New Zealander named Ernest Rutherford and a few weeks later an Irishman named John Sealy Townsend. Finally, at the beginning of 1896, another Irishman, John Alexander McClelland. joined the team.
All three engaged in the field of predilection of their mentor: electrical conduction in gases.
Rutherford gradually moved away from it, concentrating first on a system for detecting electromagnetic waves at a distance; he will then briefly take an interest in X-rays and finally invest himself in the research field which was to become the common thread of his entire career: radioactivity.
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Proud of his three protégés, JJ did not miss an opportunity to put them forward, presenting their first articles to the Royal Society in June 1896 and even inviting the very first of them to participate in the annual colloquium of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS, often abbreviated as BA). This symposium, bringing together several thousand scholars from the every part of the Empire was to be held, in this year 1896, in Liverpool .
Meanwhile, JJ Thomson continued his momentum: relying on several of his collaborators, including the Irishman John S. Townsend, he explored all the possibilities offered by the study of electrical conduction in gases. And so, in 1897, he brought to light the first constituent of atoms (which until then had been believed to be totally impossible to break down into smaller elements). If Thomson prefers to designate this particle using the term "corpuscule", the name "electron" will eventually prevail. Today it remains a keyword of our daily life, invaded by electronics, e-mail, e-business and all the "e-something" in which this little "e" evokes, very indirectly, a clumsy experimenter and an outstanding mathematician of the end of the 19th century.
But JJ's adventure continued into the twentieth: developing in 1904 an atom model (called "plum pudding"), he received in 1906 the sixth Nobel Prize in Physics "in recognition of the great merits of his theoretical and experimental investigations on the conduction of electricity by gases.".
Even if his "plum pudding" is dethroned by the atomic model of Rutherford and Bohr in the early 1910s, J. J will remain a major figure in physics.
He left his position as director of the Cavendish laboratory at Cambridge University in 1919. He was then replaced by a certain... Ernest Rutherford.
JJ will nevertheless remain in the premises, continuing his personal research. We can still see him, sitting next to Ernest Rutherford in this group photo of the entire Cavendish team in 1933.
We find them both in great discussion, still in the Cavendish laboratory and in 1933, on the following image.
JJ Thomson, died in 1940, three years after Ernest Rutherford (though he was 15 years older).
He will join him in the necropolis of Westminster Abbey, a short walk from the tomb of Isaac Newton.
Rose, his wife (whose portrait presented here dates from the 1920s), will be buried in the same place in 1951.
In 1937, the year of Rutherford's death, JJ and Rose's son, George Paget Thomson, received the Nobel Prize in physics, "for the discovery of the diffraction of electrons by crystals". The electron was therefore a family business.
Joan Paget Thomson, George's little sister, played a more indirect role in the life of the Cavendish laboratory: her father entrusted her with the responsibility of welcoming the wives of the younger generation of researchers. This is how she became the friend of Anna Kapitza, the wife of Piotr Kapitza, a Russian researcher who was a key member of Rutherford's team in the years 1920-1930.
However, Joan would also have her own destiny, outside the domain of her father and brother, since she would become a writer (especially of children books, but not only) under the name of Joan Charnock: she actually married in 1946 a man named Harry H. Charnock. 30 years his senior, he had lived a first life in Russia (as a footballer, among others), where he had had two children.
Joan and Harry would have a daughter together, but the husband would apparently have another influence on his wife: the themes of her works would be mainly related to Russia and Poland. In 1968, she published a biography of Lenin in particular.
Sources:
JJ Thomson and the Cavendish laboratory in his day , George Paget Thomson,
The Life Of Sir JJ Thomson , Robert John Strutt Lord Rayleigh
Flash of the cathode rays: a history of JJ Thomson's electron , Per F. Dahl
The Cavendish Laboratory, 1874-1974 , James Gerald Crowther
The Charnock Family , in Franck's Life Story
History of Physics , Melba Phillips; Spencer R. Weart, page 216 (article "Piotr Kapitza, octogenarian dissident")
Writers Directory 1980-1982, page 215 : works of Joan Charnock