Rutherford and Boltwood

460 Hook Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Tyrkiel’s monograph, based on 1,324 bibliographical sources, is not only a very detailed historical work; it is a very specialized handbook which permits better understanding of all difficult thermodynamical terms. Despite the English and Russian summaries, it is unfortunate that this volume is published in Polish, making it difficult for foreign scien­ tists to become fully acquainted with this excellent book in its entirety. J. Piaskowski* Rutherford and Boltwood: Letters on Radioactivity. Edited by Law­ rence Badash. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1969. Pp. xxii+378; plates, index. $12.50. Archival materials of an extent and richness beyond the experience of historians of early science stand open to the student of 20th-century physics. These materials—manuscripts, notes, correspondence, adminis­ trative records—facilitate close studies of conceptual innovations, of the interdependence of theory and instrumentation, of the development of institutions, etc., which seldom can be made for earlier periods. For example, the first volume of the national edition of Galileo’s correspon­ dence, which runs through his forty-sixth year, contains 450 letters; ninety are outgoing, and of these the bulk concern family or administra­ tive matters. This relatively small yield, which represents the labor of many generations of scholars, cannot resolve the tantalizing questions it suggests; sometimes, as in the case of the famous letter to Sarpi of 1604 and the related manuscript fragments, it has produced more darkness than light. The Rutherford archive at Cambridge, on the other hand, was assembled in a few years from Rutherford’s own papers and the contributions of his correspondents. It includes hundreds of outgoing scientific letters dating from his time at McGill and Manchester, a period corresponding in extent and achievement to Galileo’s stays at Pisa and Padua. Supplemented by the manuscript remains of Bohr, W. H. Bragg, the Curies, Hevesy, the Vienna Radium Institute, Soddy, Boltwood, etc., etc., and by the extensive published record, the Rutherford papers will make possible better controlled treatments of the development of science than the extant Nachlàsse of Galileo and his contemporaries have been able to support. Despite these attractions few writers have exploited the known col­ lections of materials documenting 20th-century physics. In the specific case before us, it appears that only one book—Eve’s official biography of Rutherford—and a few recent papers have hitherto drawn significant­ ly on the Rutherford archive. No connected, extensive portion of the correspondence has been published, that is, if one excludes the twelve volumes of photocopies available at the Royal Society of London, at McGill University, and at two or three other libraries in former British * Dr. Piaskowski, of the Polish Academy of Sciences, is the author of many studies on the history of metallurgy. TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 461 dominions. By printing the extant correspondence between Rutherford and the American radiochemist, B. B. Boltwood—some 150 items dating from 1904 to 1924—Badash merits our gratitude for pioneering in what one hopes will be the publication of the collected letters of many impor­ tant modern physicists. Bertram Boltwood, Rutherford’s senior by one year, was trained at Yale and at the University of Munich, where he mastered the techniques of analytical chemistry, especially those required in the separation of the rare earths. He spent his professional life in New Haven, first as a con­ sulting chemist, later as a Yale professor; and in his most productive period—1904-11—he labored on the decay sequences in the thorium and uranium families. He opened the correspondence on May 11, 1904 with a report to Rutherford of measurements of «, the ratio of the content of radium to uranium in naturally occurring minerals. The separation of the uranium demanded a skilled chemist, while the evolution and mea­ surement of the emanation (222Rn), from which Boltwood inferred the amount of its parent, radium, required skills uncommon to the pro­ fession. Rutherford, who did not admire chemists (“those damn’d fools must have been chemists,” he said of some engineers who had annoyed him), immediately approved of Boltwood, partly as a hybrid and partly because his results, which indicated that a was constant for all uranium­ bearing

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