top of page

Characters in Rutherford's life

Kapitza vers 1925.jpg

Pictures:

Pyotr Kapitsa 
(1894-1984)

      A Russian physicist of Romanian origin, Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa left his homeland in 1921 to move to Cambridge. He remained there for 13 years, playing an increasingly important role alongside Ernest Rutherford and developing revolutionary research techniques.

    Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa (or Kapitza, depending on the transcriptions from the Russian Капица) was born in Kronstadt, an island town on the Neva Bay, at the head of the Gulf of Finland and a stone’s throw from St Petersburg, in 1894. 

    He began his studies at the Kronstadt Technical College in 1912, and subsequently attended the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute (the name given to Saint Petersburg had changed in 1914, following a decision by Tsar Nicholas II). He was forced to interrupt his studies for two years due to the First World War. During this time, he served as a stretcher-bearer on the Polish front.

      He graduated from the Polytechnic Institute in 1918.

      He married Nadejda Kirillovna Chernosvitova in 1916, and the couple had two children: Ieronim, born in 1917, and Nadejda, born in 1920. Unfortunately, the flu pandemic that raged after World War I first claimed his son’s life in 1919, then his wife’s and daughter’s in 1920. His father also succumbed to illness during 1919.   

Yoffe_Seminar_1915.jpg

 After graduating, he remained at the Polytechnic Institute and worked in the department headed by Abram Fyodorovich Ioffe. In 1920, Ioffe endeavoured to secure a visa for him so that he could go abroad to further his studies. Kapitsa obtained a post in Estonia, but this kept him within the borders of the Soviet Union. Ioffe wanted him to go further west, but Germany, France and the Netherlands refused to accept him, fearing he might become “an agitator amongst the young people”.

    Ioffe travelled to England, where he met J.J. Thomson and Ernest Rutherford in July 1921. Jadwiga Szmidt, who was Ioffe’s assistant in Petrograd and had worked with Rutherford in 1913–1914, also spoke on Kapitza’s behalf. According to some sources, Maxim Gorky, who had met Rutherford in Montreal in 1906, is also said to have played a part.

   This persistence paid off, as Rutherford agreed to take Kapitza onto his team. The young Russian researcher, who had joined his supervisor from Petrograd in London towards the end of May, began work at the Cavendish Laboratory on Thursday 21 July 1921, according to the letter reproduced here.

    Note that his signature indicates "Pierre Kapitza", using the French equivalent of the first name Piotr and the transcription of his last name including a Z in the last syllable, rather than an S.

Kapitza's letter to Professor Rutherford - 18 July 1921.jpg
Piotr Kapitsa in the Mond Laboratory (1934) - PH-CAVENDISH-P-00392-000-00001.jpg

From 1924 to 1932, he was deputy director of the Cavendish Laboratory, and then, from 1933 to 1934, director of the Mond Laboratory of the Royal Society of London at the University of Cambridge.

     This laboratory was specially built to house the apparatus he had developed to generate very intense magnetic fields. As his experiments also required extremely low temperatures, he arranged for helium liquefaction equipment to be installed next to his laboratory.

      In 1927, he married for the second time, in Paris, with Anna Alekseyevna Krylova, daughter of the naval engineer and mathematician Aleksey Nikolaevich Krylov.

      In 1934, he returned to the USSR to visit his parents. His passport was then confiscated by the authorities. Despite negotiations led by Rutherford and British officials, the Soviets refused to release him. Rutherford eventually agreed to sell them all the equipment developed by Kapitsa.

     He went on to establish a leading research centre in Moscow and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978 for “for his basic inventions and discoveries in the area of low-temperature physics”

Page under construction

Sources : 

bottom of page