Characters in Rutherford's life

Stefan Meyer (1872-1949)

One of the Austrian pioneers of research into radioactivity, Stefan Meyer was also the founder of the Radium Institute in Vienna, which he directed from 1910 to 1938. Involved in international bodies alongside Marie Curie and Ernest Rutherford, he maintained a lasting friendship with both of them.

Pictures:

Stefan Meyer circa 1908. Source : Zentralbibliothek für Physik in Wien (via Ruth Lewin Sime, ResearchGate)
Institut für Radiumforschung in the 1920s. Source : Osterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien (via Ruth Lewin Sime, ResearchGate)

He graduated from the University of Vienna in 1896 and the following year became Ludwig Boltzmann's assistant at the Institute of Theoretical Physics. Inspired by Friedrich Giesel, one of the first Austrian researchers to take an interest in radioactive materials, he included radium in his research into the magnetic properties of various substances. He discovered that Becquerel's radiation could be deflected by magnetic fields (a discovery also made by Ernest Rutherford in 1898).

The first letter sent to Stefan Meyer by Ernest Rutherford was dated 5 November 1904 and concerned a paper published by Meyer and his colleague Egon Schweidler, for which Rutherford congratulated his Austrian colleagues.

Meyer and Rutherford continued their research in Vienna and Montreal respectively.

January 1908 marked a turning point in their relationship. Of course, they liked each other without ever having met, but in early 1908, just as Rutherford had taken over as head of the physics department at Manchester University, Meyer made a gesture that the New Zealander would never forget. At the time, the radioactive materials were obtained from ore from Sankt Joachimsthal, a town in Bohemia, which at the time belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is now in the Czech Republic.

All the laboratories were supplied via Vienna, with the purification of the radium and the preparation of the packages being carried out under the supervision of Stefan Meyer. At the end of 1907, Rutherford ordered radium for Manchester and, at the same time, the London chemist William Ramsay did the same. To facilitate delivery, Ramsay suggested to Rutherford that the two parcels be transported by one of his assistants, who was travelling to Vienna at the same time. So the two endowments arrived in London... and Ramsay kept them. Rutherford wrote to him to claim what was owed to him, storming and negotiating... but nothing was done.

Informed of his setbacks, Meyer did not hesitate for a second: on 1 January 1908, he sent Professor Rutherford 300 mg of radium chloride... free of charge.

Ernest would remember: after the First World War, when Austria, like all the other losers in the conflict, was struggling to find funding in every field, Rutherford, then based in Cambridge, donated the same amount to the Radium Institute in Vienna. Given the soaring price of radium over the previous decade, this donation represented a windfall far greater than the gift he had received to begin his research in Manchester.

The Institut für Radiumforschung (Radium Institute) in the 1920s. Credit Osterreichische A

In 1910, Meyer and Rutherford met for the first time at the International Congress of Radiology and Electricity in Brussels. The International Commission on Radium Standards was set up during this meeting. Rutherford was its chairman, while Meyer acted as secretary.

Naturally, the exchange of letters intensified from this date onwards. The two men met again in March 1912 in Paris to validate the radium standard.

All the certificates issued by the Commission for secondary standards bore three signatures: Rutherford's, Meyer's and Marie Curie's.