Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold by Tom Shachtman

Author:Tom Shachtman [Shachtman, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

In his maturity, James Dewar claimed that his most formative early experience was the long illness brought on by his falling through the ice of a pond in 1852, when he was ten. During the two years it took for this youngest son of a vintner and innkeeper in Kincardine-on-Forth, Scotland, to recover from the rheumatic fever that followed the fall and his rescue—an illness that crippled his limbs, reducing him to moving about on crutches—the village carpenter taught him how to construct violins, as an exercise to strengthen his fingers and arms. Dewar later referred to his violin-making as the source of his manipulative skills in the laboratory. The connection he did not articulate, but which seems equally true, was that his fall through the ice birthed a fascination with cold that informed and directed his most productive years. Between the moment at the close of December 1877 when Dewar learned about Cailletet's liquefaction of oxygen, and the moment in 1911 when Kamerlingh Onnes discovered superconductivity, Dewar was increasingly consumed with reaching absolute zero and discovering the properties of matter in the ultracold environment, so completely consumed that his research became an obsession.

In 1859, then seventeen, Dewar had matriculated at Edinburgh University, residing there with his elder brother, a medical student; to earn a post as a laboratory assistant, as evidence of his dexterity he displayed one of the fiddles he had made. At Edinburgh he won various high prizes in mathematics and natural philosophy, and during his university years he studied with or assisted in the laboratories of several of the most respected physicists and chemists of the day. He designed a brass-and-wood model of what Friedrich Kekulé, the father of structural chemistry, had postulated as the structure of benzene. Dewar's model showed that the actual benzene ring could be any of six different forms; a leading British chemist sent the model to Kekulé, who asked Dewar to spend a summer with him in Ghent, a signal honor. Appointed in 1875 as Jacksonian Professor at Cambridge, Dewar taught there for the next forty years, but he never fulfilled one of the requirements of that post—to discover a cure for gout—and although he rubbed shoulders there with accomplished physicists and chemists, and collaborated on some fine spectroscopic research with colleague George Downing Liveing, he was not at ease at Cambridge. "The crudity of youth was still upon him," a chemist friend, Henry Armstrong, later reminisced, "and the free manners of a Scottish university were not those of conventional Cambridge—his sometimes imprecatory style was not thought quite comme ilfaut by the good. No attempt was made to tame him or provide means for the development of his special gift of manipulative skill."

In addition to Dewar being "a terrible pessimist," Armstrong recalled, he was "not great as a teacher," perhaps because his mind was "too original and impatient" and because "he never suffered fools gladly"; moreover, when Dewar had not meticulously prepared himself, his lectures could be "incoherent." Yet when he

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