A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [55]
In the spring of 1904, Rutherford traveled to London to give a lecture at the Royal Institution—the august organization founded by Count von Rumford only 105 years before, though that powdery and periwigged age now seemed a distant eon compared with the roll-your-sleeves-up robustness of the late Victorians. Rutherford was there to talk about his new disintegration theory of radioactivity, as part of which he brought out his piece of pitchblende. Tactfully—for the aging Kelvin was present, if not always fully awake—Rutherford noted that Kelvin himself had suggested that the discovery of some other source of heat would throw his calculations out. Rutherford had found that other source. Thanks to radioactivity the Earth could be—and self-evidently was—much older than the twenty-four million years Kelvin's calculations allowed.
Kelvin beamed at Rutherford's respectful presentation, but was in fact unmoved. He never accepted the revised figures and to his dying day believed his work on the age of the Earth his most astute and important contribution to science—far greater than his work on thermodynamics.
As with most scientific revolutions, Rutherford's new findings were not universally accepted. John Joly of Dublin strenuously insisted well into the 1930s that the Earth was no more than eighty-nine million years old, and was stopped only then by his own death. Others began to worry that Rutherford had now given them too much time. But even with radiometric dating, as decay measurements became known, it would be decades before we got within a billion years or so of Earth's actual age. Science was on the right track, but still way out.
Kelvin died in 1907. That year also saw the death of Dmitri Mendeleyev. Like Kelvin, his productive work was far behind him, but his declining years were notably less serene. As he aged, Mendeleyev became increasingly eccentric—he refused to acknowledge the existence of radiation or the electron or anything else much that was new—and difficult. His final decades were spent mostly storming out of labs and lecture halls all across Europe. In 1955, element 101 was named mendelevium in his honor. “Appropriately,” notes Paul Strathern, “it is an unstable element.”
Radiation, of course, went on and on, literally and in ways nobody expected. In the early 1900s Pierre Curie began to experience clear signs of radiation sickness—notably dull aches in his bones and chronic feelings of malaise—which doubtless would have progressed unpleasantly. We shall never know for certain because in 1906 he was fatally run over by a carriage while crossing a Paris street.
Marie Curie spent the rest of her life working with distinction in the field, helping to found the celebrated Radium Institute of the University of Paris in 1914. Despite her two Nobel Prizes, she was never elected to the Academy of Sciences, in large part because after the death of Pierre she conducted an affair with a married physicist that was sufficiently indiscreet to scandalize even the French—or at least the old men who ran the academy, which is perhaps another matter.
For a long time it was assumed that anything so miraculously energetic as radioactivity must be beneficial. For years, manufacturers of toothpaste and laxatives put radioactive thorium in their products, and at least until the late 1920s the Glen Springs Hotel in the Finger Lakes region of New York (and doubtless others as well) featured with pride the therapeutic effects of its “Radioactive mineral springs.” Radioactivity wasn't banned in consumer products until 1938. By this time it was much too late for Madame Curie, who died of leukemia in 1934. Radiation, in fact, is so pernicious and long lasting that even now her papers from the 1890s—even her cookbooks—are too dangerous to handle. Her lab books are kept in lead-lined boxes, and those who wish to see them must don protective