PHYSICS AND PHYSICISTS IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE

THE FIRST SEVENTY FIVE YEARS

 

by

 

S. G. Tomlin

 

 

During this year of 1974 the University of Adelaide has been celebrating its centenary.  Having been associated with an attempt to organize an exhibition of the work of the Physics Department over this period I have been persuaded to write a short account of its achievements.  Realizing that this essay will fall far short of the scope and elegance of the product of an historian, I hope, nevertheless, that this story will be of interest to physicists and perhaps do something to stimulate an interest in the proper preservation of historical material.  When one comes to attempt something of this kind it is sad to find how little effort has been made in the past to care for such records and equipment even when associated with persons of the highest distinction, let alone those lesser mortals who have, nevertheless, made their contributions to the growth and traditions of what ought to be among our most respected institutions.

 

Throughout most of the period under review the Professors of the University were singularly exalted personages about whom lesser luminaries moved as satellites, not infrequently undergoing total eclipse.  In Sir William Mitchell's phrase "the professors were the University".  For this reason, and because it is convenient, this account will be presented in terms of the incumbencies of the first three Professors of Physics.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HORACE LAMB 1849 ‑ 1934

 

The University of Adelaide was founded in 1874, and with a gift of £2O,OOO from W. W. Hughes, and a similar sum from Thomas Elder, established its first chairs.  Hughes's donation was devoted to the founding of two Professorships, one for Classics and Comparative Philology and Literature, and the other for English Language and Literature and Mental and Moral Philosophy, perhaps not so much chairs as chaiseslongues.  Thomas Elder's contribution was left at the disposal of the University Council and used to found two chairs, one of Mathematics, and one of Natural Science.  The task of selection of the Professor of Mathematics was entrusted by the Council to a British committee consisting of “J. Todhunter, Esq., M.A. F.R.S., Hon. Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge;

P.G. Tait, Esq., M.A. Professor of Natural Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh; Henry W. Ackland, Esq., L.M., Regius Professor of Medicine in the University of Oxford, and President of the Medical Council; and Thomas H. Huxley Esq., Professor of Natural History in the Royal School of Mines (the first association of a distinguished name with the University of Adelaide); assisted by the Right Hon. Sir James Fergusson, Bart., and F. S. Dutton, Esq., C.M.G., the Agent-General".

 

 

Living in Adelaide at this time was the Reverend Slaney Poole who had been a master at Stockport Grammar School where he had been particularly impressed by a pupil Horace Lamb whose subsequent career he had followed.  He knew that this young man had proceeded to Trinity College Cambridge and graduated as Second Wrangler and had been elected a Fellow and Lecturer of his College.  He sought to interest Lamb in the Adelaide vacancy and in a letter to the Adelaide Advertiser of October 12th 1934 recalled the part he played in Lamb's appointment to the Elder Chair of Mathematics. He wrote

 

"My acquaintance and, indeed, I may say, my friendship with the late Professor Lamb, extends over many years before his arrival at Adelaide.  I had just taken my degree at Cambridge before I was 21 years of age, and had obtained the position of a classical mastership at Stockport Grammar School. Lamb was at that time head boy, and only some three years my junior.  We were drawn together in as friendly way as was possible in those days by being much of the same age, not only in the school, but in the playground; his Latin and Greek was one of my duties, and I found him so apt in his studies that I always thought of him as one who would eventually "go out" in classics.  Nobody who knows me well would ever attribute any of his mathematical development to anything that I could teach him.  He went after a year or two, to Cambridge and went out in the mathematical tripos as Second Wrangler, and was eventually a Fellow of Trinity College.  I had only been a year at Stockport when I accepted a classical mastership at St. Peter's Collegiate School in Adelaide;  this I never took up, but I did come to South Australia, and have been here ever since.  I was then 22 years old.  My earlier years here were spent in the rough life of a bush clergyman, 67 years ago, and I had lost sight and touch of many of my old friends in the Old Land.  I had, however, noted Lamb's career in some respects, and when in the late seventies the University of Adelaide was founded, and was on the look out for professors, I wrote to my friend and suggested making application for the professorship in mathematics.  I had heard that he was married, and would therefore have had to resign his Fellow-ship at Trinity College, and I thought that he might be glad to start his new life in helping to build up a seat of learning in this new country. He followed my suggestion, applied for the post, and was appointed."

 

At the time of his appointment Lamb was 26 years of age.  In Cambridge he had studied and taught applied mathematics and Sir Richard Glazebrook [1935] in a Royal Society Obituary Notice, tells of his time as one of Lamb's students.

 

He says

 

"his lectures were a revelation" and that "he had read Helmholtz's memoir in Crelle's Journal for 1858, and Thomson's Edinburgh paper [1867] 'On Vortex Motion'.  In these and in the writings of Cauchy, Reimann, and others dealing with complex variables, in "Thomson and Tait", “T & T” it used to be called, and in the works of Stokes and Rayleigh on waves and vibrations generally, he found material for the course he gave us, for which he earned our gratitude and our regrets when we heard shortly afterwards that he was to go to Adelaide as professor".

 

With such a range of interest Lamb was well equipped to lecture in pure and applied mathematics, and also to give instruction in Natural Philosophy which he was called upon to do.  And so although Lamb was formally the Elder Professor of Mathematics he began the teaching of physics in Adelaide University.

 

The newly wed Professor and his wife, born Miss Elizabeth Foot the sister-in-law of his former headmaster the Rev. Charles Hamilton, arrived in Adelaide in March 1876 in time for the beginning of the first teaching year of the new University.  Only temporary accommodation in Victoria Square was available to the University and it was not until 1882 that its first building was opened, the building now known as the Mitchell Building.  The four professors who now constituted the teaching staff were to face a student body of eight matriculated students and fifty two others, of whom the Council's report of 1876 comments

 

"It is a gratifying sign of the times that so large a number as thirty-three ladies have, as non-matriculated students, attended some of the University Classes during the first year of its operation, for it is certain that high mental culture on their part must react on the other sex, and give a powerful impetus to self-education, and the acquirement of literary as well as social knowledge.  It is hoped that ladies will become matriculated students, and compete for Degrees and Scholarships".

 

In fact the community of South Australia, in its attitude to women, was enlightened beyond the general standards of the time, and it must have made a marked impression upon the young professor from the exclusively masculine preserve of Cambridge University to find young women sitting at his feet.

 

The scope of Lamb's teaching may be assessed from entries in the University Calendar for 1877.  In Mathematics the first year course consisted of three lectures per week on Geometry, Algebra, and Trigonometry, Elementary Analytical Geometry, and (if time permits) the elements of the Differential Calculus".  In Natural Philosophy the first year course of two lectures per week covered Statics, Kinetics, Hydrostatics, the Elements of the Science of Heat, and Elementary Astronomy.  In the second year Lamb gave three lectures per week on Heat, Sound and Light.

 

The text books for these latter courses being Deschanel's "Natural Philosophy", Brinkley's "Astronomy" and Maxwell's "Theory of Heat", and, to quote again from the Calendar "In each of these courses the lectures will be illustrated as far as possible by experiment.  In the Second Year's course opportunity will be given to the students, as far as possible, of practising physical methods of observation, and of becoming acquainted with the use of the various instruments".

 

In the following year a Third Year course in Mathematics was added consisting of "The Statics of Solids and Fluids, and the Kinetics of a Particle, with the requisite subsidiary parts of Pure Mathematics", and the above comment on experimental work was supplemented thus: "In addition to the above courses, instruction in Practical Physics will be given in the Physical Laboratory at times to be arranged.  The work will consist partly of repetitions and variations of the lecture experiments, and (in the case of the more advanced students) of experiments of a more refined nature, such as the accurate determination of physical quantities, etc.".

 

Reference has already been made to Glazebrook's reaction to Lamb's lecturing in Cambridge and two other comments have been recorded.  One, from a member of Lamb's first classes held in Adelaide who later became Sir T. H. Beare, Regius Professor of Engineering in Edinburgh reads [Glazebrook, 1935]

 

"Lamb was a wonderful teacher; he was carrying out at that time a good deal of his original work in hydrodynamics.  He was an excellent lecturer, very clear, very lucid, and, as he had to deal with somewhat raw material, it was a difficult task for him'.  Another from an unidentified student writing to the Adelaide Advertiser [10/12/34] runs "Lamb was a marvellous mathematician.  He would fill the blackboard with an algebraical problem, written too speedily for us to follow.  He would then turn and say, 'Is that clear?'  We tried to say, 'Yes'; when one impudent fellow said, sotto voce, 'Clear as mud'.  The professor seeing the doubtful look on our faces, would rub off the figures and start all over again ‑ a little more deliberately".  These somewhat opposed estimates perhaps suggest only that a student's assessment of his teacher may depend a good deal upon the former's aptitude for the subject.

 

From the beginning the University endeavoured to reach as wide an audience as possible and instituted courses of Public Elementary Lectures to which Lamb made a widely varied contribution with courses on "Sound and the Physical Bases of Music", "Optics, with special reference to the Theory of Vision", "The Earth and our Knowledge of It", "Demonstrations in Physics", "The Scientific Principles involved in Electric Lighting, and in the Electric Transmission of Power", and "Acoustics".

 

In addition to these teaching duties Lamb was busy laying the foundations of a most distinguished career in applied mathematics with his researches in hydrodynamics, elastic vibrations and electromagnetism.  During his stay in Adelaide he wrote some nineteen papers, the first being "On the free motion of a solid through an infinite mass of liquid" [Lamb, 1876] and the last "The cause of the luminosity of flame" [Lamb, 1886].  Among these papers is one dealing with the vibrations of an elastic sphere a subject followed up, after leaving Adelaide, with a paper on the propagation of tremors over the surface of an elastic solid which was one of the fundamental contributions to theoretical seismology.  Another paper "On electrical motions in a spherical conductor"

[Lamb, 1884] was a discussion of Maxwell's Equations as applied to a spherical conductor, and he also delivered a discourse at the annual commemoration of the University of Adelaide on December 17th, 1884 on "The history of electromagnetism".  It is of interest to realize that this was several years before Hertz's demonstration of electromagnetic wave propagation was published in 1888.

 

Undoubtedly Lamb is best known for his book on hydro-dynamics.  He had lectured on this topic at Cambridge and "the need for a treatise on the subject was strongly impressed on (his) mind".  In 1879 he published his "Treatise on the Motion of Fluids".  The first edition was a volume of 258 pages but with successive editions, the last appearing in 1932, the book increased in size to some 600 pages while the title shrank to "Hydrodynamics"

 

Much of the material incorporated into later editions was the result of Lamb's own researches and the book became one of the most significant volumes of its time in the field of applied mathematics.  In 1884 Lamb was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in recognition of these researches carried out in Adelaide, quite alone and in an isolation not easy for a modern scholar to fully appreciate.

In 1885 Lamb was granted leave of absence from Adelaide University for a visit to England.  It seems to have been expected that he would not return, and it came as no surprise to the University to learn that he had accepted the Chair of Pure Mathematics at Owens College, Manchester.  He was fare-welled in the University Library by a gathering of students and staff and presented with an illuminated address engrossed on vellum which reads:

"Professor Lamb, M.A., F.R.S. - Dear Sir - We who have enjoyed the rare privilege of sitting at the feet of so able an instructor as yourself gladly avail ourselves of the occasion of your departure for England to enjoy a well earned holiday, to express in some slight form our high appreciation of your ripe scholarship and the universal esteem in which you are held.  The zeal displayed in the discharge of your arduous duties, and the interesting and happy manner in which you have delivered your able lectures, will not soon be forgotten by those who have attended them.

 

Your ready and generous assistance in times of difficulty, and the kind interest you have always shown in our welfare, have become bywords to us who in the pursuance of our studies have come under your care.  It is therefore with mingled feelings of pleasure and regret that we join in wishing Mrs. Lamb and yourself a very pleasant journey, and we trust that at no distant date we shall have the pleasure of seeing and hearing you again".

 

In his reply to the presentation Professor Lamb said, among other things, that "The portion of the address and of the remarks which pleased him most was that which referred in far too flattering and far too feeling terms to his personal relations with the students.  It had been his constant endeavour that the relations between a professor and his pupils should be those of good-fellowship and friendship, and not those of a domine and his pupil". [Adelaide Register 30.7.85]

 

The address has recently been returned to the University of Adelaide, having been presented by Lamb's granddaughter Mrs. E. M. Cohen wife of Dr. Henry Cohen of Queens' College Cambridge, who, as a result of a chance conversation with Professor Trevaskis of Adelaide University, searched for and found the document.

 

Another piece of good fortune occurred in 1965 when Professor R. B. Potts [1966] was staying with friends in London and found that the next door neighbour was Lady Pansey widow of Henry Lamb, a well-known artist, who was one of the six children born to Horace and Elizabeth Lamb in Adelaide.  This lady introduced him to Lady Dorothy Nicholson, one of the two surviving daughters of Horace Lamb, who, in the course of conversation, recalled the existence of a silver rose bowl presented by the University of Adelaide to Professor Lamb and still in the family's possession.  After some searching it was found and presented to the University of Adelaide, a very fine piece of silver, which with the illuminated address make two splendid mementoes of the very distinguished first Professor of, Mathematics in Adelaide.

 

Much of Lamb's best work was yet to be done after leaving for Manchester.  His famous book on hydrodynamics was followed by others on infinitesimal calculus, on statics and on dynamics and no doubt many a practising physicist of today will have one or two of these volumes on his shelves, perhaps a little dusty now, but much used in his student days.  But the story of his career after returning to England will not be followed here, except to record that he was the recipient of many honours, was twice Vice President of the Royal Society from which he received both the Royal and Copley Medals.  He was knighted in 1931.  After his retirement from the Manchester Chair he spent the remainder of his life as an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he continued his researches until the end.  He died in 1934 aged 85 years.

 

It seems appropriate to end with a tribute paid to him by Lord Rutherford on the occasion of the presentation of a Portrait of Lamb to the University of Manchester in 1913.  He said "If Professor Lamb will allow me to say so, he reaches more nearly my ideal of a university professor than anyone I have known.  His wisdom and prudence in council are proverbial.  Many of us try, though I am afraid with indifferent success, to follow his example of unswerving rectitude and to emulate his high ideals of duty to our University".

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WILLIAM HENRY BRAGG 1862 - 1942

 

Lamb's last service to the University of Adelaide was to join with J. J. Thomson and Sir Arthur Blyth, the Agent-General for South Australia to elect a successor to the Elder Chair.  Their choice fell upon W. H. Bragg a young Cambridge graduate.

 

The sources of information upon which I have relied for the following account are the Royal Society Obituary Notice written by E. N. Da C. Andrade [1943], a biographical essay by his son and daughter, Sir Lawrence Bragg and Mrs. G. M. Caroe ,(Gwendolen Bragg) [1962], which both make use of some auto-biographical notes which Bragg himself wrote in 1927, or there abouts, and the Murtagh Macrossan Lecture on "The life and work of Sir William Bragg" delivered by Sir Kerr Grant [1952].

 

 

William Henry Bragg was born on July 2nd, 1862 to Robert John Bragg, formerly an officer in the British Merchant Navy, but then farming near Wigton in Cumberland, and his wife, born Mary Wood the daughter of the vicar of the parish.  His mother died when he was seven years old and he went to live with his Uncle William Bragg at Market Harborough in Leicestershire.  There he went to school in the re-established Grammar School, in the reviving of which his uncle had taken a leading part.  Uncle William was, apparently, a formidable character, but "he was very kind, and he had lots of humour", and was anxious that young William should do well in life.  Uncle William's was a bachelor establishment consisting of himself and Uncle James,

"a dear kind man, very simple and earnest, repressed and overpowered by Uncle William", his nephew and a niece Fanny.  Much later Sir William wrote "We lived a very quiet life at Harborough.  Before breakfast Uncle James and I went out riding for an hour to an hour and a half:  we got to know well the villages round.  Our longest rides would be to Kibworth or Kelmarsh, six miles away.  I was not fond of riding for some reason, though I liked the morning air and I liked the pony.  Ballgames of all sorts have always interested me more than country sports:  I enjoyed them very much, while hunting, fishing the like did not attract me at all;  moreover they never came my way.

 

After the ride the day was filled with school, preparation for school, and an occasional walk.  There were very few games in those days as the school was a day-school without grounds.  At the end of my six years there we had a little football, which was a great delight.  There were no parties for children:  we never went to other people's houses, and no children came to ours.  I think my Uncle was too "particular" - he was indeed a refined and educated man - to let us fraternize with the children of the small shopkeepers, and as he was a shopkeeper himself, we were not asked to the houses of the lawyer, the parson and so on."

 

After six years with Uncle William, Bragg's father took him away and sent him to school at King William's College in the Isle of Man.  In recalling this experience he wrote "after the first year or two, when the bullying was rather unpleasant, I was happy enough.  I stood high in the school and liked my work, especially the mathematics: and fortunately I was fond of all the games and played them rather well.  So, though I was a very quiet, almost unsocial boy, who did not mix well with the ordinary schoolboy, being indeed very young for the forms I was in, I got on well enough".  In fact he became head of the school, and when he was seventeen won an Exhibition at Trinity College Cambridge.  He was advised to return to school for another year and to try again with a view to improving his position.  Unfortunately his second attempt was less successful than his first, but he was elected to a minor scholarship in consequence of his earlier performance.

 

This set-back was due, principally, to an outbreak in the school of an extreme religious fervour of the kind which exhorts the sinner to be "saved" lest he suffer the punishment of eternal damnation and hellfire.  Bragg wrote “we were terribly frightened and absorbed:  we could think of little else. .…... it really was a terrible year".  Little wonder that his work suffered, and that the memory of this experience was still strong upon him when in 1941 he referred to it in his Riddel Memorial Lecture.

Bragg weathered the storm and entered Trinity College where he settled down happily to work and play.  He says of these years "I went up to Cambridge in 1881, taking the rather unusual course of beginning work there in the Long:  I suppose I was in Cambridge six weeks or so, July and part of August.  But I forget the exact date.  I had rooms in Master's Court.  I appreciated thoroughly the beauty of the whole place;  and I liked going to Routh's classes.  It was lonely, because I was doing the unusual thing:  and I had no companions.  But it was good all the same.  As a scholar of the College I went up every Long afterwards:  it was always a jolly time. Very few restrictions:  just the regular classes three times a week with Routh, and the preparation for them. After that tennis in plenty:  boating on the river above Cambridge, and the summer weather, and Cambridge looking its best.  I tried during that preliminary Long to get through an exam that would excuse me the Littlego:  and I failed in Latin, which seems to me now to be very odd, as I had studied Latin from the time I was seven, and given a lot of school time to it, and worked conscientiously too!  I had to take the Littlego in November after all.

 

Cambridge gave me a good time, of course:  although I might have done much better if I had known more or been more easily sociable.  I ought to have gone to lectures on other subjects than mathematics, and taken an interest in other things.  It simply did not occur to me.  I could not afford, or thought I could not afford, to join the Union or the Boating Club;  which cut off a good many opportunities.  I had none of those experiences of discussion of the world and its problems with other young men, which many men seem to look back upon with so much pleasure.  I worked at the mathematics all the morning, from about 5-7 in the afternoon, and an hour or so every evening, and then bed fairly early.  Every afternoon I played a game, generally tennis, or went for a walk: my tennis was fairly good, so that I always found people ready to play."

 

"He was indeed good at games of all kinds" wrote his son and daughter adding that "at Cambridge he was one of the first to play hockey and has told us how he and his fellow enthusiasts had to cut their own sticks out of the hedges.  To the end of his days he carried a scar on his forehead which he used to tell us was given him by the Duke of Clarence, Queen Victoria having selected hockey as a nice quiet game for him to play when he came up to Cambridge."

 

In 1884 he sat the Mathematical Tripos and was placed Third Wrangler, about which he recalled "I was afraid I had not done well in the exams:  I remember my anxious mind as I walked up Senate House Passage to hear the results.  When I heard my name called out as Third Wrangler, I was really amazed:  I had never expected anything so high, not even when I was in my most optimistic mood.  I was fairly lifted up into a new world.

I had a new confidence:  I was extraordinarily happy.  I can still feel the joy of it!  Friends congratulated me: Whitehead (of Harvard now) came and shook me by the hand saying "May a Fourth Wrangler congratulate a Third?"  He had been fourth the year before.  As for the Uncles!"

 

After this he continued his mathematical studies, took part III of the Tripos, as it then was, and was awarded a First.  Later he said "I believe that none of us did too well, but nearly all got Firsts because the Senior Wrangler did not do any better than we did and they could not give him a second."

 

Bragg was now 23 years old and he had to look to his future.  This was settled by a chance meeting one morning at the end of 1885 when, on his way to attend a lecture by J. J. Thomson fell in with the speaker, who, as they walked along King's Parade asked if Sheppard, the Senior Wrangler of that year, intended to apply for the vacant chair of mathematics at Adelaide

 

Bragg was astonished to learn that so young and inexperienced a man, notwithstanding his academic record, might be considered for such a position, but he asked Thomson if he thought he would have a chance himself, and receiving an encouraging reply hastily telegraphed an application just within the time limit.  In due course Bragg, with two others (Sheppard was not a candidate), appeared before the selectors and Bragg was appointed. In this connection Andrade quotes from a letter written by Bragg to Sir J. J. Thomson on the occasion of the latter's eightieth birthday:  "I must be allowed to add my own personal congratulations.  Just fifty-one years ago, I was walking with you along the K.P. on our way to the Cavendish where you were going to lecture and I was going to be one of the audience.  You asked a chance question, which sent me off to the telegraph office after the lecture was over and I applied for the Adelaide post which Lamb was vacating.  It was the last day of entry; and of course your remark sent me to Australia.  Perhaps you were the one who asked a certain Adelaide man then visiting London - whether the Council of the University of Adelaide was likely to prefer a senior wrangler who occasionally disappeared under the table after dinner to a young man who had so far shown no signs of indulging in the same way.  The man was Sir Charles Todd, whose daughter I married a few years afterward.”

 

The news of his success reached Bragg at Market Harborough where one "evening as Fanny and I were playing about on the piano, a telegram was brought to me." "As new professor of mathematics and physics in Adelaide University, would I give some particulars of my career"' Well, you can imagine my delight! which was reasonable.  An assured position, a salary beyond all expectation, a new country with all the adventure of going abroad to it, a break away from being a subject, to be now my own master.  I took the telegram across to my Uncle at the shop:  he read it, finished without a word the posting that he was doing, took me home across the square in the dark, and on the way he broke down.  It had not occurred to me that the glorious success would mean to him a parting that he would feel so badly.  But I hope that his own pride in the result of what he had always worked for through me carried him through."

 

He left for Australia in January 1886 sailing on the P and C ship "Rome" of 4500 tons, the largest of the line, and apparently enjoyed the voyage.  He spent a good deal of time aboard ship in studying physics for he had not previously worked at subject except for a short time spent in the Cavendish Laboratory after graduating.  He says "it was supposed by the electors that I would probably pick up enough as I went along to perform my duties at the Adelaide University.  So I read some Deschanel’s Electricity and Magnetism".  Concerning this Andrade remarks “Apparently the demands on a professor of physics were not very high in those days".

 

Although the telegram from Adelaide quoted above referred to Bragg as professor of mathematics and physics, the professorship was formally one of mathematics and is referred to in the University Calendar of 1887 as "The Elder Professor of Pure and Applied Mathematics, who shall also give instruction in Physics", suggesting that physics was officially regarded as a lesser part of the responsibilities of the chair, and had not yet acquired the academic respectability of mathematics.  It could scarcely have been foreseen that the well trained mathematician, ignorant of physics, would become one of the most eminent physicists of his time.  Nor would his early years in Adelaide have generated any such expectation.  Certainly he took up the new subject with enthusiasm, rapidly acquiring mastery of the theoretical aspects and also going to the exceptional lengths of apprenticing himself to a firm of instrument makers in order to make apparatus himself for his deficient teaching laboratory.  Thus early interest in practical work, which he frequently stressed as a most important part of the teaching of physics, and his development of his own manual skills was to bear fruit some eighteen years later.

From the moment of his arrival in Adelaide he thoroughly enjoyed, his life in Australia.  He met with a friendly reception, not least from the family of Charles Todd who, as we have seen, played a part in Bragg's appointment.  Todd was Postmaster General and Government Astronomer of South Australia:  he was elected F.R.S. in 1889 and later knighted.

 

Bragg soon became a regular visitor to this household in which prevailed a relaxed easy-going atmosphere quite unlike the more rigid formality to which he had been accustomed in Victorian England.  The young man, who later regretted that he had not been more easily sociable in Cambridge, found in Adelaide a society in which his personality blossomed so that he enjoyed a wide popularity.  Here, as at school, his interest in games helped him.  He played tennis and took up golf of which his son (W.L.B.) remembered "I used to caddy for him as a boy and I remember going round with him when he was planning a new course at Seaton near Adelaide, which later became a well known course".  He also played a leading part in introducing lacrosse to South Australia, and there exists an excellent photograph of the North Adelaide team, taken soon after his arrival in Adelaide and which he captained for some years.

 

And so Bragg found a full and happy life in Adelaide compounded of an agreeable blend of work and play and social activity.  Then three years after meeting the Todd family he married one of the daughters, Gwendoline. This marriage was a very happy one and Bragg was fortunate in finding a wife whose support was invaluable to him, particularly after his return to England.  Three children were born to them in Adelaide, William Laurence, Robert who was killed at Gallipoli, and a daughter Gwendolen.

 

As we have seen Bragg entered on his teaching duties energetically.  He also played a full part in University affairs and took a particular interest in student activities.  The formation of the University Union, in which Cannon Poole, whom we have already met, played a leading role, occurred at two meetings on May 9th and April 25th 1895, at the second of which Bragg was elected as one of the two Vice Presidents.  The minute book of these earliest meetings of the Adelaide University Union exists with the minutes of the first Ordinary Business Meeting and of the first Annual General Meeting signed by Bragg chairman.  This book also shows that Bragg was a leading spirit in a scheme for building a room for the Union and in the third annual report (1898) of the Committee of the Union a reference to expenditure on furniture and carpets for the Union Room precedes the comment "we have reduced our debt to Prof. Bragg to a very appreciable extent" which surely indicates that he had, personally, helped with the finances.

 

His main academic interest shifted from mathematics to physics and he rapidly developed latent talents for expounding the latter subject both in formal classes, and in public addresses to more general audiences.  In commenting on a remark of Andrade’s Kerr Grant wrote "Bragg, from the very first, was marked as a born teacher and lecturer.  Professor Andrade says (quoting - no doubt from hearsay - some Adelaide source) that in his early days "he was one of the least impressive of lecturers."

 

If there is any justification at all for this disparagement it may rest either on his complete inexperience in the art of lecturing or in his disdain of the use of rhetoric in which one of his colleagues, himself a master in that "poison of sincerity" was wont to appraise the quality of another's oratory."

 

In these early years in Adelaide Bragg undoubtedly cultivated those powers of clear presentation of physical topics, found a delight and skill in experimental demonstration, which were to become so conspicuous a feature of his later s at the Royal Institution.  In 1895 he gave courses of extension lectures on "Radiation", in 1896 on "X-rays" and in following year on "Sound".  He was acutely interested in developments in physics and incorporated new material into his lectures.  In particular he concerned himself with electro-magnetism and

X-rays.

 

In 1895 he published his fourth paper on electromagnetism but these papers were mainly concerned with alternative derivations of known results and contained no significant new findings.  However in that year he was experimenting with the electromagnetic waves which had been investigated experimentally by Herz, who had published his work in 1888.  One day while engaged in trying to make a Herzian oscillator work he received a young visitor who was passing through Adelaide on his way to England, from New Zealand.

 

The visitor was Ernest Rutherford then aged 24, who had been awarded an 1851 Exhibition (after first choice had declined the offer) on the strength of some experimental work on radio transmission carried out at Canterbury College, Christchurch.  He had with him the magnetic detector which he had devised.  This meeting was the beginning of a life-long friendship, an encounter which proved of great value to both men and to their scientific work.

 

Bragg returned to work on radio transmission three years after an interval during which his attention was attracted the discovery of X-rays.  The news of Röntgen's astonishing discovery, published in December 1895, reached Australia in paragraphs in the South Australian Register and Sydney Telegraph of January 31st 1896, and several attempts were immediately made to reproduce Röntgen's experiments.  Professor Lyle in Melbourne had already been experimenting with discharges in gases and was well placed to carry out these investigations.  He was probably the first man in Australia to obtain an X-ray photograph.  In Adelaide Bragg, with his assistant A. L. Rogers set about producing X-rays.  Rogers was a remarkably versatile and able man whose workshop and laboratory skills were invaluable to Bragg.  Of him W. L. Bragg wrote that he "had genius, and with my father designed pieces of equipment remarkable for their simplicity, elegance and fitness for their purpose."

 

Rogers tackled the problem of making X-ray tubes.  This was, then, a formidable task, not so much because of difficulties of mechanical construction, but rather those of evacuating the tubes to the required degree, and ensuring that the gas pressure in the sealed-off tubes stayed at the appropriate working value.  Rogers overcame the difficulties and made the first successful X-ray tubes to be produced in South Australia.  He kept a diary, still in existence, recording the progress of some of Bragg's earlier work, from which I have been allowed to copy relevant extracts. The first is

 

Monday June lst 1896.                       Röntgen rays just reached us.  Startling like the telephone.

 

Clearly this cannot refer to the first news of the discovery of X-rays, for this had been reported four months

earlier in the local press, and must refer to some demonstrations of X-ray photography given in Adelaide as reported in the South Australian Register of Saturday May 30th 1896.  According to this account

Mr. S. Barbour, a senior chemist of Messrs. F. H. Faulding and Co., had recently returned to Adelaide from a holiday in Europe, bringing with him Crookes tubes suitable for the production of X-rays, and "on Thursday he secured a fair impression of a human hand".  The report continues "On Friday evening Mr. Barbour took his tubes to the University Laboratory where further successful experiments were carried out ...….Professor Bragg, assisted by Mr. Barbour conducted the experiments, while Mr. Rowe developed the plates.

Those present were Drs. Giles, Swift, and Lendon ………….First of all Professor Bragg submitted his hand with a coin placed under one of the fingers as a subject, and it is no exaggeration to say that the result was marvelous, and fully equaled any of the photos which had been seen in Adelaide………….. A defect in one of the digits was plainly revealed.  This was secured with only five minutes exposure".

 

Again on Monday June lst a second demonstration was given to an audience including many medical men at the University.

 

There seems no doubt that Rogers's entry in his diary refers to these events.  The next entry strikes a triumphant note.

 

Saturday June 13th 1896.                  Got photo with our own Röntgen tubes.

 

This was a photograph of a mouse with remarkably good definition.  The original X-ray plate has disappeared but a lantern slide made from it survives in the Physics Department, which also has a print of an X-ray photograph taken by Rogers, showing the lower part of Mrs. Rogers's head and neck, dated 13th 1896.  One of Rogers first X-ray tubes also survives.

 

On June 17th 1896 Bragg delivered a lecture on X-rays in the University Library before the Governor and a fashionable audience who evidently paid for the privilege, the proceeds being donated to the Building Fund of the Students Union.

 

In the course of this lecture he referred to Rogers success of a few days before and showed the lantern slide of the mouse.

 

Naturally the possible medical applications of the new radiation attracted most attention and it happened that the young W.L. Bragg was one of the first to benefit from the new discovery.  He wrote in the foreward to "Salute to the X-ray Pioneers of Australia" (published by W. Watson and Sons Ltd.)

 

“I well remember my father's first, experiments with X-ray tubes, although I was only six years old at the time.  I think I must have been amongst the first to be employed as a patient.  I had smashed my elbow badly by a fall and was taken to a cellar in the University for the exposure.

 

The flickering greenish light, crackling and smell of ozone were sufficiently terrifying to impress the incident deeply in a child’s mind.  When I think, however, of the early experiments, the interest which they aroused in medical men is not their chief significance to me!  I see them as fore-runners of my father's interest in the ionisation of gases leading to his experiments with X-rays from radium and finally the experiments on the diffraction of X-rays by matter which we carried out together."

 

Many years were yet to pass before Bragg embarked upon that serious study of X-rays to which his son refers, but in the meantime Mr. Rogers was active in the making of X-ray tubes and assisting with medical equipment in Adelaide.

 

In 1898 Professor Bragg was given a year's leave of absence to visit England.  This was the occasion for the following tribute from the Committee of the University Union.

"We shall this year be without the invaluable services of Professor Bragg who has gone for a holiday trip to Europe.  The Committee made an effort before his departure to show how we recognize his unceasing labours on our behalf but owing to his hasty departure we were unable to arrange for any general expression in the name of appreciation and had to content ourselves with a written expression in the name of the members of the Union".

 

In England, following his earlier experiments with Herzian waves, he became very interested in the beginnings of radio communication.  In the year of Röntgen's discovery the young Marconi was working in Bologna on the transmission of signals by means of electromagnetic waves, and in 1896 he moved to England where he secured the support of the British General Post Office for his work.  Already, in his first two terms at Cambridge, where he began work early in October 1895, Rutherford had created a stir with his successful transmission and

reception of radio-signals over half a mile across the town.  Rutherford did not pursue this work any further himself, but by the time Bragg reached England it was clear that wireless telegraphy over considerable distances was feasible, and on his return to Adelaide he began work with his father-in-law Sir Charles Todd on this new means of communication.  The story of progress is outlined by entries in Rogers's diary.

 

These show that before his trip to England Bragg had been lecturing on "Marconi's apparatus" and Rogers had been busy working on such equipment.  But following Bragg's return we find

 

Wednesday May 10th 1899 Observatory.*       Marconi telegraphy a great success up to 600 yds splendid morse messages.

 

These messages were recorded on a paper tape of which two fragments still exist in the Physics Department. These are dated April 20th and May 9th 1899 and are, almost certainly, the first recorded messages transmitted by wireless telegraphy in South Australia.

 

The diary continues:

 

Saturday May 13th 1899.                    Observatory messages sent a measured mile.

 

and this is followed by references to work on improving coherers, the detectors generally used at that time.  Then a receiving station was set up at Henley Beach, on the coast about five miles from the observatory.

 

            ____________________________________________________________________________

 

            *Footnote:

The observatory referred to was the old State Observatory situated in the

West Park Lands where the Adelaide Boys High School now stands.

 

Friday June 23rd 1899.                      Wave signals to Henley Beach from Observatory with iron coherer,

                                                           very wet.

 

Saturday July 8th 1899.                      Bragg wires success for Henley Beach wireless telegraphy.

 

Thursday July 20th 1899.                   Good messages from Henley Beach to Observatory.

 

An additional comment on these achievements exists in an account given by Miss Lorna Todd and quoted by Kerr Grant

 

“I think I am right," she says, "in saying that the first wireless pole to be erected in Australia was in the Observatory grounds.  A receiving pole was put up on the sand-hills at Henley Beach.  My brother-in-law did much experimental work there.  One afternoon I remember that my father asked me to tea and drive down with him to Henley Beach, saying he would send a 'wireless' to say that we were coming. 

I felt a very ‘doubting Thomas' as I packed a specially nice tea and tied paper around the blackened picnic billy-can (there were no thermos flasks in those days).  However, when we got within sight of the tall pole on the sand-hill there was my brother-in-law waving his arms and his cap, as thrilled as any schoolboy that the message had come through.  It seemed a miracle.  Both he and my father were almost boyish in the delight and the fun of the discoveries then being made so rapidly in science.”

 

Continuing Rogers’ diary we come across an entry shgowing that X-rays had not been forgotten, and giving an indication of the rigours of X-ray examination in those days.

 

Monday August 14th 1899.                 X-photo taken with “jubilee” tube of young Waite’s collar bone 55 minutes exposure including stoppages to cool down.  Extra rapid

plate used and Dr. Verco’s coil with 8 accumulators failure.

 

This is followed by references to more work on coherers and then

 

Monday Septembe 11th 1899.              Fixing experiment for Extension lecture on Wireless telegraphy.

 

Wednesday September 13th 1899.      Professor Bragg gives extension lecture in Wireless telegraphy a great success.

 

Wednesday September 20th 1899.      Professor Bragg lectures on wireless telegraphy, large audience.

 

Monday September 25th 1899.           Conversatzione to teachers.  Wireless from Observatory to University.  Wehnelt, Syntonic jars of Lodge.  Mirage, Ripple tank.  Refraction and reflection of the ether waves for the first time.

This last reference is particularly interesting because there survives in the Physics Department a large sulphur prism and a cylindrical sulphur lens used by Bragg.  Sir Lawrence Bragg believed that the prism was made to determine whether or not X-rays could be refracted, but Professor R. W. Chapman, who had been appointed Lecturer in Mathematics and Physics in 1888 (subsequently professor of engineering in 1907), and may be presumed to have been well aware of Bragg’s laboratory work, told Sir Kerr Grant that it was used for experiments on the refraction of Herzian waves.  This would appear to be substantiated by Roger’s note on the conversatzione programme.  It is, of course, possible that it was made originally for the one purpose, and being available was later used for the other.

 

We now approach the turning point of Bragg’s scientific career which occurred in 1904 when he was 42 years of age.  Prior to this time, he had developed a capacity for clear and precise thought about physical matters, and had cultivated the art of lucid exposition and the craft of the experimentalists, but he had not published any significant piece of original work.  But in January of that year the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science (now more familiarly known as A.N.Z.A.A.S.) met a Dunedin and Bragg gave the Presidential Address to Section A.  It was entitled “On some recent advances in the theory of the ionization of gases”, [Bragg, 1904a] and was a thorough revue of the considerable body of knowledge that had been built up within, roughly, the previous ten years, and more expecially since the discovery of the electron in 1897.  The latter part of the address delt with the ranges and ionizing powers of a and b particles in matter.  These constituents of the radiation from radio-active substances had been distinguished by Rutherford in 1899, and in 1903 he had established that the a particles were much more massive than the b particles, which were easily identified as electrons.

 

Bragg discussed the mechanism of absorption of these two kinds of particles, attributing the experimental absorption of b particles mainly to the effects of scattering, and pointing out that “in the case of the a ray we could hardly expect that a close collision between an electron of the a particle and an electron of the gas molecule through which the particle is passing would have much effect in turning the a particle to one side.  Scattering must be a less important couse, and gradual stoppage through expenditure of energy must be a more important cause, of the absorption of the a radiation”.

 

He goes on to describe an experiment of the Curies which appeared to confirm this view and wrote “If the

a particles are stopped through sheer expenditure of energy, and if they all start with the same speed, they must all come to a stop at the same distance”.

 

On his return to Adelaide Bragg began his well known experimental work on the ranges of a particles.  An anonymous donation of £500 enabled him to buy some radium bromide and other necessary equipment, and he designed, and Mr Rogers constructed an apparatus for the measurement of the ionization along the length of a well collimated beam of a particles from a source which could be moved relative to a very shallow ionization chamber.  Provision was made for varying the pressure and temperature, and the nature of the gas I the chamber.  This apparatus has been lost but a replica of it, in its final form, was made, for our Centenary Exhibition, from a drawing by Rogers which appears in one of Bragg’s papers [1906 c].

 

As he was about to begin this work, by a stroke of good fortune, Bragg obtained the services of a most capable assistant.  A young man named Kleeman, employed as a blacksmith in the Barossa Valley town of Tanunda, wrote to Bragg asking for help with some mathematical problems.  Bragg responded and became sufficiently impressed with the young countryman to invite him to study at the University, paying his way by acting as his experimental assitant.  Kleeman accepted the offer, proving his worth with his very painstaking observational work for Bragg, and also by graduating, and in 1905 receiving the award of an 1851 Exhibition.  This he took up at Cambridge where he worked with Sir J. J. Thomson studying the velocity of cathode rays ejected from substances exposed to the g-rays of radium.  Subsequently he was appointed Associate Professor of Physics at Union College Schenectady, but later moved to the Research Laboratories of the General Electric Company.

 

Bragg’s first experiments [1904 b] showed clearly the well defined ranges of the a particles and, with Kleeman [1904], he showed that a radium source in equilibrium with its products of disintegration gave four groups of

a particles of distinctly different ranges, in air, which could e associated with radium, radon, RaA and RaC, the sequence which had been established by Rutherford and Soddy at McGill University.  Bragg’s early papers were usually published in both the Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia and in the Philosophical Magazine, but he also wrote long letters to Rutherford, in Canada, giving detailed accounts of his work.  Rutherford was keenly interested in Bragg’s findings, replying in encouraging vein, and an extensive corrrespondence between the two exists, which I understand is being prepared for publication.

 

In the third paper by Bragg and Kleeman (1905 a] they reported improvements to their apparatus and gave accurate values (to within 0.05 cms) for the ranges of the four groups of particles.  They also investigated the stopping powers of substances for a particles and showed that the loss of range of the particles in traversing any atom is nearly proportional to the square root of its weight.

 

They next investigated [1906 b] the recombination of ions in air and other gases and cleared up a discrepancy between observation and the current theory by introducing the idea of “initial recombination” i.e. the possibility that an electron dislodged from an atom might return almost immediately to its parent atom.  Before the completion of this work Kleeman left for Cambridge.

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