Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [74]
Anyway, it was not necessary: in scientific terms, Langmuir had already killed Lewis. Langmuir had won a Nobel Prize for work that Lewis considered his own. Lewis had sown the seeds of his own destruction, though, by making bitter enemies of two chemists who were highly influential in Stockholm. Walther Nernst and Svante Arrhenius hated each other; Arrhenius had managed to block Nernst’s much-deserved Nobel Prize for fifteen years. But Lewis gave them a common enemy. In a 1907 paper he had called some of their work ‘unsystematic’ and ‘inexact’. Their ‘old approximate equations’ would ‘no longer suffice’. The paper rendered Lewis’s hopes of a Nobel Prize as good as dead.
In October 2010, a study by Dutch researchers found that schoolchildren who are timid and introverted are more likely to go into science – like lambs to the slaughter, one might say. Though few would openly admit the fact until recently, it is now clear that if you want to achieve greatness in science, you need to be ready to kill or be killed. In the race to discovery, there are no prizes for second place. As Peter Medawar wrote:
Much of a scientist’s pride and sense of accomplishment turns … upon being the first to do something – upon being the man who did actually speed up or redirect the flow of thought and the growth of understanding … Artists are not troubled by matters of priority, but Wagner would certainly not have spent twenty years on The Ring if he had thought it at all possible for someone else to nip in ahead of him with Götterdämmerung.
This is a theme that is repeated throughout science – especially where Nobel Prizes are involved. Take the story of the transistor, for example. The transistor is the defining technology of the modern world. Its function sounds prosaic: it is, essentially, a switch and amplifier for electrical signals. But your life would not function without transistors. Besides their obvious uses in computers, mobile phones and internet servers, they sit inside toasters and washing machines, cars and microwave ovens. Take away transistors, and today’s world would be unrecognisable.
In the twenty-first century we have learned to make transistors almost unimaginably small: in 2008 Bell Labs unveiled one made from a single molecule. The world’s first transistor, by comparison, was around a centimetre tall. It, too, was born at Bell Labs. And it was born out of anarchy: Walter Brattain, John Bardeen and their boss William Shockley won the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for its invention, but by the time they arrived in Stockholm they were bitter enemies.
The conflict began in 1947. Brattain remembers Shockley bursting into the laboratory where he and Bardeen were working on a design for an amplifier that would be the forerunner of the first transistor. Shockley had learned that they had been talking with Bell Labs’ patent lawyers, and he reminded them that it was he who had shown how to control the electric current flowing through a piece of silicon: any patent should be his, he warned them. ‘Oh hell, Shockley,’ was Brattain’s reply. ‘There’s enough glory in this for everybody!’
Shockley was unappeased. He decided to go it alone, and took his own transistor design to the patent lawyers. It was a disaster. Their search for precedents uncovered the fact that, in 1930, the physicist Julius Lilienfeld had filed a US patent for a transistor identical to Shockley’s. The only way Bell Labs would be able to patent a transistor, the lawyers told him, was if they used Bardeen and Brattain’s design.
For a month, Shockley agitated, sleeping badly at night and scheming by day. Then he had what Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson, the authors of Crystal Fire, call ‘the most important idea of his life’. It was a sandwich of semiconducting materials that would amplify electrical signals in a whole new way. He told Bardeen and Brattain