Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold (21 page)

Olszewski became convinced that Dewar had deliberately ignored his work, that "the experiments of Professor Dewar are merely the repetition and confirmation of [my] researches," and that "the first apparatus serving to produce large quantities of the liquefied so-called permanent gases ... was constructed by me." Olszewski further charged that the Dewar-Fleming work on the magnetic properties of materials at low temperatures was just a repetition and slight extension of that previously done by Clausius, Cailletet, and von Wróblewski. These charges were printed in the February 1895 issue of the English-language journal
Philosophical Magazine,
and they appeared in that venue as one result of the growing rift between Dewar and other leading lights of British science.

The bad blood may have dated back to 1877, when the chemist William Ramsay had applied for the chair at the Royal Institution that was shortly won by Dewar. Ramsay was a fellow Scot and was similarly trained; his later successes, including a Nobel Prize in 1904, attest to his strength as a chemist. It is likely that he was denied the Royal Institution position only because he was ten years younger than Dewar. Intimates of Ramsay recall he took the defeat well enough, and he was also turned down for other chairs before settling in at the University of London—but Dewar appears to have never forgiven Ramsay for the effrontery of applying for a chair that he believed was his almost by divine right.

Then there was Lord Rayleigh, born John William Strutt, who was a neighbor of Dewar's, occupying the upstairs laboratory at the Royal Institution. Early in 1894 Rayleigh began to look into an anomaly in the density of nitrogen; within the year, this examination led Rayleigh and Ramsay to the discovery of a new gas, eventually named argon. The day after their first, brief announcement—really a report on work in progress—was made, and again a few days later, Dewar cast doubt on their work in letters to the London
Times,
claiming that what they had discovered might only be an isotope of nitrogen. These letters bothered Rayleigh—he didn't expect to be publicly sapped by a colleague when the information (and doubts) could as easily have been conveyed privately—but Ramsay ignored them and continued on. Dewar pretended to do so as well,
even corresponding with Ramsay about his progress in isolating the as-yet-unnamed gas.

Morris Travers, then Ramsay's assistant, and a brilliant chemist and tinkerer himself, later wrote of this moment that Dewar misinterpreted his own findings and missed discovering argon, concluding that "if he had been skilled on the chemical side, he could hardly have missed krypton, not to speak of neon and xenon," the other noble (inert) gases Ramsay and Travers would discover in ensuing years. In Travers's view, Dewar's strength was the "engineering" aspect of chemistry, not analysis. More important for the story of research into the low-temperature regions, Travers deprecated Dewar's insistence on "a policy of secrecy" about the exact configuration of his apparatus for liquefying air; for most of the early 1890s, that secrecy kept others from being more active competitors in the race to liquefy hydrogen, permitting Dewar to maintain the lead position.

The Ramsay-Rayleigh research continued through the late summer and fall of 1894, when there appeared in
Chemical News
letters signed by a pseudonymous "Suum Cuique," suggesting that Dewar, rather than Ramsay, had first alerted Rayleigh to the work of Henry Cavendish, who nearly a hundred years earlier had noted the anomaly in nitrogen. It was thought that Dewar, or someone acting for Dewar, was Suum Cuique, but this was never proved.

However, when it came time for Ramsay and Rayleigh to choose a chemist to liquefy argon, as part of a group of people examining its various qualities, Ramsay chose Olszewski rather than Dewar, and Rayleigh could no longer object to this passing over of his neighbor in favor of a distant collaborator. The choice of Olszewski was not mere spite, according to Travers: Ramsay knew Olszewski had trained under Bunsen, as he himself had done, and he had checked Olszewski's results on other matters, which were good; moreover, Olszewski used a gas thermometer for his readings, while Dewar used indirect measuring instruments that Ramsay considered unreliable.

While Olszewski and Ramsay were in contact about the argon research—which Olszewski successfully accomplished—the Pole told his new collaborator about his own long-simmering annoyance at Dewar. In late 1894 Ramsay arranged for Olszewski to publish two articles, one a "Claim for Priority" in
Nature
in January 1895, and a second in the February 1895 issue of the
Philosophical Magazine,
and to announce a forthcoming English-language publication of Olszewski's collected research articles.

Dewar struck back immediately, and with great force, in the next issue of the
Philosophical Magazine:

It is usually assumed that if a scientific man has a grievance on some question of priority, he speaks out boldly at or about the time when his discovery is being appropriated.... Professor Olszewski prefers to nurse his complaints for four years and then to bring them out simultaneously in two English scientific journals. The result, I am afraid, will be grievously disappointing....We want in this country a reprint of the splendid papers of the late Professor Wroblewski. Until this is done it will be impossible for the scientific public to decide on many of Professor Olszewski's claims for priority.

Dewar then went on to show that one part of Olszewski's apparatus had been taken from an 1878 design by Pictet and that another part had been borrowed from Dewar's own 1886 device, a virtual blueprint of which he had attached to his 1886 article on meteorites. Since that article had been on a seemingly unrelated subject, Olszewski might be excused for not having spotted it; in fact, Onnes had also missed the article—he later wrote that he had overlooked it because no report of the paper showed up in the
Beiblätter
journal of abstracts. But Dewar would not forgive Olszewski for missing his meteorite paper. He also quoted Olszewski against himself, citing other articles in which the Pole had described using glass rather than metal containers up through 1890, and an instance where Olszewski had cited the results of an 1892 Dewar and Liveing article in one of
his own reports. Dewar concluded that Olszewski's claims for priority were "fantastic and unfounded."

At this time Dewar also refused to permit Pictet to visit his low-temperature laboratory, in order, he later wrote, "to prevent any further recriminations," and he decided to initiate a correspondence with Heike Kamerlingh Onnes.

In a restrained but determined handwritten note to the Dutch professor in 1895, Dewar wrote that there were only three people in the world who could "know the worries ... of low temperature research and who can appreciate [that] such work requires a long apprenticeship of a very trying and disheartening kind." He conveyed his upset at Olszewski's articles, which gave to the public the ludicrous idea that liquefaction of gases was easy; Onnes, of all men, would know this was absurd. "The fact is I never learnt anything in the way of manipulation of liquid gases from Prof. Olszewski," Dewar charged. Trying to achieve common ground with Onnes, Dewar confided that his two professorships and their attendant details were getting in the way of his liquefaction research: "If I had nothing else to do but low temperature work I like you might get on faster." He pledged that from here on in, he would do nothing that did not add "lustre to the dignity of science."

Hardly. Not content to leave well enough alone, in an article printed a month after the first salvo at Olszewski, Dewar digressed from the subject at hand to slam the Pole's English sponsor:

One can only wonder at the meagre additions to knowledge that in our time are unhesitatingly brought forward as original, and more especially that scientific men could be got to give them any currency in this country. Such persons should read the late Professor Wroblewski's pamphlet, entitled "Comment l'air a été liquefié" [How the Air Was Liquefied], and make themselves generally acquainted with the work of this most remarkable man, before coming to hasty conclusions on claims of priority brought forward by his some-time colleague.

There could be no doubt about whom Dewar referred to, even if he did not name Ramsay. This unnecessary bashing of a fellow member of the Royal Society, one of the most distinguished scientists of his day, would shortly have repercussions that Dewar could not have imagined, and that would directly influence the forthcoming stages of the race for the ultimate pole of Frigor.

B
Y
1895
WILLIAM THOMSON HAD BECOME
Baron Kelvin of Largs, Great Britain's grand old man of heat and cold, though at seventy he was far from retired. The early experiments he and Joule had conducted together had suffered the usual fate at the hands of time: younger scientists took them for granted and did not reexamine them for clues to further research. The Joule-Thomson effect—the lowering of temperature attendant on the rapid expansion of highly pressurized gases into less pressurized environments through a porous plug—had not attracted much attention from pure-science researchers in the forty years between 1855 and 1895. But in a rare reversal of precedence, researchers with commercial goals in mind paid close attention to the Joule-Thomson effect, as was evident from the near-simultaneous filings of patents for gas-liquefaction processes based on Joule-Thomson expansion in the late spring of 1895 by Carl Linde and William Hampson, which led directly to the first large-scale commercial utilization of the products of the ultracold.

Linde's patent filing was the culmination of nearly twenty years' work, during which his company had sold more than a thousand refrigeration systems and had established its own research laboratory to investigate the commercial potential of newer liquefaction techniques. These pursuits led Linde to combine in a single machine the use of Joule-Thomson expansion, a heat exchange principle, and an engine earlier invented by Siemens. Linde aimed at the commercial manufacture of liquefied oxygen and nitrogen, respectively for use in steel making and as agricultural fertilizer.

William Hampson, who patented a similar machine at almost the same moment in time, was a curiosity in Great Britain's scientific circles. Though he had been schooled at Oxford and had trained as a barrister at the Inner Temple, his name never showed up on any lists of lawyers, and his activities before 1895 have remained obscure. They can only be inferred from his later pursuits. He qualified as a medical practitioner and ran the x-ray and electrical departments of St. John's Hospitals in Leicester Square; he also invented electrical devices for muscular stimulation, and he wrote popular science books and an economics tract warning against the use of credit. Hampson came up with his own design for a "regenerative" machine for producing lowered temperatures, based on Joule-Thomson cooling and an adaptation of Pictet's cascade methodology; he was awarded a patent in May 1895, two weeks before Linde. Ralph G. Scurlock, a historian of cryogenics, puts the feat in context by pointing out that "Hampson with his limited facilities was able to invent and develop a compact air liquefier which had a mechanical elegance and simplicity which made Dewar's efforts seem crude and clumsy by comparison." Shortly, Hampson entered into a commercial partnership with Brin's Oxygen Company to produce liquid oxygen.

The efficacy of what came to be called the Linde-Hampson liquefaction process was so evident that pure researchers as well as commercially minded ones immediately sought to adopt the new process, either by purchasing a machine or by using the underlying principles to develop their own versions. Kamerlingh Onnes, for instance, bought a Linde machine as soon as it was available. And in Great Britain, Sir William Ramsay asked Hampson if he could borrow one, because he couldn't obtain any liquid air from James
Dewar. Ramsay and Dewar were at loggerheads again. In December 1895, Dewar told a meeting of the Fellows at the Royal Society about his progress on hydrogen, and Ramsay rose to suggest—once more—that Olszewski had already liquefied the gas. An angry Dewar dared Ramsay to produce proof. At the next meeting, Ramsay had to admit that in the interim he had received a letter from Olszewski, denying having obtained hydrogen liquid from the static form of the gas. Dewar then published his account of the controversy, further humiliating Ramsay.

This occurred at a moment when Ramsay desperately needed liquid air to further his research on rare, inert gases. Just recently he had made a discovery of vast importance to the table of elements and, not incidentally, to the next stages of the exploration of the cold: Ramsay had found helium on Earth. For about a quarter century, helium had been known to exist on the sun, identified through a bright yellow line in a spectrum analysis of the sun's corona. But it had been believed to exist only on the sun. In 1895 Ramsay was working with a sample of pitchblende, a dark rock containing uranium and radium, which was also known to expel argon when heated; he saw in the spectrum analysis of the gases emitted from the pitchblende the same bright yellow line previously seen only in the analysis of the sun, and he concluded that helium was present on Earth in small quantities. There was immediate controversy over helium as well; Dewar thought it might only be an isotope of hydrogen, while Ramsay insisted it was an entirely new element.

To obtain more helium so he could experiment with it and better delineate its properties, Ramsay required liquid air. And since Dewar was now unlikely to give him any, Ramsay looked for other ways to obtain it; he formed alliances with both Hampson and a young researcher at the University of London, Morris Travers, who believed he could devise his own apparatus for producing liquefied gases in quantity. Ramsay bankrolled Travers, but with only £50, a minuscule amount of money compared with what Dewar usually spent on machinery; this budget did not allow Travers the luxury of having parts made, so he borrowed them from other projects—a pipe here, a compressor there—and cobbled them together.