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Characters in Rutherford's life

Kapitza vers 1925.jpg

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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 Nadezhda Kirillovna Chernosvitova in 1916, and the couple had their first child, Ieronim, in 1917. In 1919, Nadejda was pregnant again. Sadly, the flu pandemic that raged after the First World War first claimed the life of Piotr Kapitsa’s father, then that of his son Ieronim in December 1919. In January 1920, his wife and his newborn daughter also died.

Yoffe_Seminar_1915.jpg

 After graduating, he remained at the Polytechnic Institute and worked in the department headed by Abram Fyodorovich Ioffe.

      In 1921, Ioffe was selected, along with other Russian scientists, to join a commission of the Russian Academy of Sciences tasked with resuming scientific relations with other countries. The aim was to restore Soviet Russia’s reputation, re-establish contacts with Western laboratories and procure equipment to revive scientific research, which had been severely disrupted by the Bolshevik Revolution.

        Kapitsa was a member of the same commission, but whilst the other delegates were already in Berlin, he found himself stranded in Reval (the former name of Tallinn), the capital of Estonia. The Germans refused to grant him a visa, fearing he might act as an ‘agitator’ amongst the youth. The Netherlands and France followed suit.

       The young man remained in Estonia for two months. In late May 1921, he finally obtained a visa to travel to Great Britain, thanks to the intervention of Maxim Gorky, who was still close enough to Lenin (and who had met Rutherford in Montreal in 1906).

     Ioffe hoped that Kapitsa would be able to remain in the West, not only so that he could discover new research methods there, but also because he believed that, should he return to Petrograd, he might dwell on the four bereavements he had just suffered.

     Jadwiga Szmidt, who assisted Ioffe in Petrograd and had worked with Rutherford in 1913–1914, had praised Rutherford’s working methods to Piotr Kapitza. Ioffe also thought it would be a good idea for Kapitza to apply for a post at the Cavendish Laboratory.

     On 12 July 1921, Kapitsa and Ioffe travelled to Cambridge, where they met J.J. Thomson and Ernest Rutherford. The latter agreed to take Piotr Kapitsa onto his team (who, in any case, had no other options).

   The young Russian researcher began work at the Cavendish Laboratory on 21 July 1921, as stated in the letter reproduced here.

Kapitza's letter to Professor Rutherford - 18 July 1921.jpg

Note that the 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.

Kapitsa stands in front of large alternator - Cambridge circa 1933.jpg

    From 1924 to 1932, Kapitsa served as deputy director of the Cavendish Laboratory. In 1927, he married for the second time in Paris to Anna Alexeyevna Krylova (1903–1996), daughter of naval engineer and mathematician Alexey Nikolaevich Krylov, who had headed the Russian Academy of Sciences’ commission tasked with resuming scientific relations with foreign countries in 1921. Anna and Piotr had two sons: Sergei (1928–2012) and Andrei (1931–2011), who went on to become a physicist and a geographer, respectively.

    From 1933 to 1934, Kapitza served as director of the Mond Laboratory of the Royal Society of London at the University of Cambridge. This laboratory was built specifically to house the devices he had developed to generate very intense magnetic fields. Since his experiments also required extremely low temperatures, he arranged for a helium liquefaction unit to be installed next to his laboratory.

 

        Kapitza commissioned sculptor Eric Gill to engrave a crocodile on the building’s facade, a nod to Rutherford, whom Kapitza nicknamed “the Crocodile.” The Russian researcher offered several explanations for this nickname: it might have stemmed from the animal’s status as a father figure in Russia, or from the fact that a crocodile cannot move backward, just as Rutherford who always moved forward; finally, one last explanation traces its origin to James Barrie’s Peter Pan, in which the crocodile, having swallowed an alarm clock, unwittingly announces its approach with a ticking sound, just like Rutherford, whose heavy gait and powerful voice signal his imminent arrival in a room.

Crocodile by Eric Gill - Mond Laboratory - Copyright Michael Behrend.jpg
Piotr Kapitsa in the Mond Laboratory (1934) - PH-CAVENDISH-P-00392-000-00001.jpg

   In 1934, he returned to the USSR to visit his mother. 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”

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