Collected Papers Of Sir James Dewar Volume Ii

Sir James Dewar was a major figure in British chemistry for around 40 years. He held the posts of Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy at Cambridge (1875-1923) and Fullerian Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution (1877-1923) and is remembered principally for his efforts to liquefy hydrogen successfully in the field that would come to be known as cryogenics. His experiments in this field led him to develop the vacuum flask, now more commonly known as the thermos, and in 1898 he was the first person to successfully liquefy hydrogen. A man of many interests, he was also, with Frederick Abel, the inventor of explosive cordite, an achievement that involved him in a major legal battle with Alfred Nobel. Indeed, Dewar's career saw him involved in a number of public quarrels with fellow scientists; he was a fierce and sometimes unscrupulous defender of his rights and his claims to priority in a way that throws much light on the scientific spirit and practice of his day. This, the first scholarly biography of Dewar, seeks to resurrect and reinterpret a man who was a giant of his time, but is now sadly overlooked. In so doing, the book will shed much new light on the scientific culture of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and the development of the field of chemistry in Britain.

For more than two hundred years the Royal Institution has been at the centre of scientific research and has also provided a cultural location for science in Britain. Within its walls some of the major scientific figures of the last two centuries - such as Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday, John Tyndall, James Dewar, Lord Rayleigh, William Henry Bragg, Henry Dale, Eric Rideal, William Lawrence Bragg and George Porter - carried out much of their research. Their discoveries include sodium, the miners' lamp, the electric dynamo, transformer and generator, the 'thermos' flask, x-ray crystallography and much else besides, all of which brought about major changes in the way we live. The success of the Royal Institution in research and in locating science within general culture led it being used as a model for other institutions, most notably by the founders of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Much has been written about the scientific work in the Royal Institution, but comparatively little attention has been devoted to the cultural settings which allowed the Royal Institution to become such a major site for the creation of scientific knowledge. This book seeks to rectify this gap by examining various aspects of its history through both thematic and chronological chapters.

This is the second of three volumes which together contain the complete range of Lord Rutherford’s scientific papers, incorporating in addition addresses, general lectures, letters to editors, accounts of his scientific work and personal recollections by friends and colleagues. Volume two, first published in 1963, includes the papers published by Rutherford when professor of Physics at Manchester, 1907 to 1919. While the work of his laboratory ranged over the whole field of radioactivity, he himself devoted much effort to questions concerning the nature and properties of the α particle. Consideration of the scattering of α particles led him to the second of his outstanding achievements, the conception of the nuclear structure of the atom, which opened up a new era in Physics. In each volume can be found photographs of Rutherford and his collaborators, multiple graphs, tables, diagrams and charts, and also pictures of the original apparatus which is of historic interest.