VICTORIAN PIONEERS

Evening Post, Volume CXXI, Issue 20, 24 January 1936, Page 8

VICTORIAN PIONEERS

PHYSICIST'S MEMOIUES

NOTABLE SCIENTISTS

In this renascent period when the scientific institutions of London arc

being remodelled, it may be of interest to recall some memories of one who was closely associated in experimental work with many notable physicists of the last century, says a writer in the Melbourne "Age." Robert S. Chapman, successively assistant to Professor Frederick Guthrie, Sir Arthur Rucker, and Lord Strutt, when a boy, spent his Saturdays in each school week in his father's workshop at the Royal School of Mines. This was in the same building as the Geological Survey's offices and museum, Jermyn Street, Piccadilly.

In 1868 his father, Robert Chapman, an assistant to Michael Faraday, and afterwards to Professor John Tyndall, was transferred from the Royal Institution to assist Professor Guthrie at the Physical Laboratory, Jermyn Street. It was here that the son's experimental training began. In some recent notes to the writer, he describes the workshop as "an underground kitchen in the house next to the museum." "The room," he said, "was almost dark, even in the daytime; it had a stone floor and was lit by flaring gas jets. It also contained an old-fashioned firiplace, an old ricketty lathe which I learned to use, an old desk with shelves of bottled chemicals, and was fitted with a carpenter's bench." One of his early attempts at chemical experiments was spectacular and only too succesful, causing a tremendous sensation amongst the attendants, who thought the building was afire when he added sulphuric acid to powdered sugar. FREQUENT VISITORS. Members of the staff of the Geological Survey from the rooms adjoining often visited this "dungeon," to use the work-bench and tools. Amongst them were Robert Etheridge, sen., palaeontological assistant to Professor Thomas Huxley, and also the father of the late curator of the Australian Museum, Sydney, and Edwin Tulley Newton, another assistant to Huxley, who -W.-ote the classic description of the Tasmanite Shale from the Latrobe Valley, Tasmania. About the year 1872 the physics department of the Royal School of Mines was transferred from Jermyn Street to South Kensington, where Robert Chapman, sen., continued to work under Guthrie, his son being later appointed to help in the preparation and repair of physical apparatus. It was here that H. G. Wells, in 1885, was, as he relates in his "Experiment in Autobiography," told to "make a barometer out of a piece of glass tubing, a slab of wood that - required planing, and some bits of paper and brass." "So," he says, "instead of a student I became an amateur glass worker and carpenter." He was baffled between "the slow and obstructive Guthrie and the swift, elusive Boys." It was only after some years that Wells learnt that Guthrie must have been ill at the time with the malady which afterwards caused his death. A GREAT STIMULUS. During the seventies .and eighties the experimental work of the Royal College of Science, as it , was now called, received a great stimulus from the visits of eminent physicists, with whom Robert came into contact. There were Helmholtz, with his apparatus for producing the human voice, Graham Bell bringing the earliest telephone and the firtf; phorograph with its cylinder of hardened wax, Crookes, with his radiometer and vacuum tubes, and Oliver Lodge, who acted as first secretary to,'and was afterwards president of, the Physical Society of London, which had been founded by Guthrie. About this period Robert successfully photographed a diamond burning in oxygen, revealing the "make up" of the crystal. He was one of the first to carry out the technique of radiography, and his accurate knowledge and experience of photographic methods, from the early days of the wet-plate process to the modern, was of the greatest service to Sir Vernon Boys, then assistant to Guthrie, especially in his investigations of air-wave compression caused by flying bullets. A recent contributor to "Nature" wrote of Boys, who, by the way, lately celebrated his eightieth birthday:— Why snatch a bullet, in Its flight, lilt' by a single spark so bright, That on a photographic plate The fleeting shadow seemed to wail — With wake flnd bow-wave primly set— All posing for their silhouette— And leave a picture of the noise? Because, of course. Boys will be boys 1 A JOKE. Whilst the assistant Professor, C. V. Boys, was playing with soap bubbles, studying the habits of spiders and their threads and imitating those threads in quartz, Guthrie was trying to unravel the forces that controlled patterns of the cracks in broken glass and the curious behaviour of colloids. On one occasion Guthrie, after experimenting with certain jellies,' tried to imitate their behaviour in another way by filling air balloons with water. Always rqady for a practical joke on his colleagues, he took one of these water--filled balloons and, packing it into a round dish, he painted it with radial lines and circles, after the style of, a jellyfish. A sudden inspiration urged him to try it on the great biologist,! Professor Huxley, whose study was on the top floor of the college. The great man was not in' his room when the specimen was delivered, and the joke ended in an anti-climax, for soon after, the object was returned to "the silly fool who had sent it."

Besides his extraordinary skill in constructing scientific apparatus, Robert was an expert photographer, and had learned the art from no less a master than Sir William Abney, F.R.S, Many a fine negative was thus produced by the wetrplate process, whilst he was well-known for his success in photo-micrography. His varied interests included horticulture, and he was successful in raising sub-tropical plants in his greenhouse, as well as several native Australian plants in his garden, such as Eucalypts and Acacias. He was always keenly interested in the Australian flora, but there were occasional disappointments when an unusually severe winter cut them down.

One of his hobbies was the preparation of sections, of plant stems from his garden, that he double-stained with great success, whilst the excellent slides he prepared from crystallisable and compound salts, retarded by the addition of colloids, are difficult to be matched.

Robert S. Chapman died last August at Richmond, Surrey, England, at the age of nearly eighty years. His lifework in the domain of physical, science, so perfect as it was in the! minutest detail, has both consciously! and unconsciously inducted many ai students working in those earlier years] at South Kensington. And no less is this realised by the writer, who owes Ito him' that interest in the shells of the Foraminifera, which afterwards became a life study. Surely— Ilio9B wo call the dc.iifl I Are breathers of nn nmiilcr iliiy ynr cvor nobler ends, j