[Max/michelle2]

by Guest Tue Oct 21, 2014 8:08 pm

This may be of interest to you:

http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/3974_1.html#ftn.1

by Guest Tue Oct 21, 2014 8:30 pm

Weiner( interviewer): Even after four years of internment. When you got back to Manchester, I assume that the first period was just one of recuperation.

Chadwick:
Yes, you see I could not digest fats, and it was a very trying time indeed. I was quite ill in a kind of way. I was certainly very weak. I’m still troubled by it. My digestion before the first war was exceedingly good. I could digest anything. It’s never been the same since. I still have to be a little careful. But then I went back to Manchester and, of course, I went to see Rutherford, and Rutherford was very short of staff. They were still in the Army and he very kindly suggested that I should do some teaching in the laboratories and earn a little money because I had nothing left. When I got back to England, I had 11 pounds and a few shillings left, and that was all. And one of the first things I saw when I went to the laboratory was Rutherford’s experiments on artificial disintegration. He told me what was happening, showed me, and I sat in on one of the experiments. Of course, it was very exciting. But the chief thing was that it gave me time to recover some health and to earn a little money to keep me going. And then Rutherford was invited to succeed J. J. Thomson as Cavendish Professor and he was very sorry to leave Manchester where he had some friends. I won’t say he was reluctant to go — I don’t think he was, in a way — reluctant would be the wrong word. He was sorry to go. But he felt it not only his duty. In those days, the Cavendish professorship was something quite different from any other professorship in physics in this country, or even in any other branch of science, if it came to that. So he had to go. And he asked me to go with him to help him to start up the radioactive work at Cambridge because there had been very little done in Cambridge up to that time. And, in addition, during the war, every effort in the laboratory was devoted to the war effort. There was no ordinary research going on.

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Chadwick spent four years in jail as a prisoner in Germany during the First World War. He narrowly escaped getting jailed for another six years as he was in Germany again when the Second World War broke out.

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