The Man Who Stalked Einstein (13 page)

Having familiarized himself with the history that lay between the two men, Etter felt
that he had prepared himself as much as possible. He’d read the passages he’d found
cited in Lenard’s note and felt that he now understood Lenard’s point of view. He’d
also read and reread a footnote he’d found well into the text: “A comparison can best
make clear to the neutral observer Roentgen’s role in the discovery,” Lenard wrote.
He went on,

I shall make this striking comparison here because it may throw a light on the even
now widespread historical confusion and untruth! Roentgen was the midwife at the birth
of the discovery. This helper had the good fortune to be able to present the child
first. She can only be confused with the mother by the uninformed who knows as little
about the procedure of the discovery and the preceding facts as children of the stork.

Etter reopened Lenard’s book and took another glance at the flyleaf. From his first
interview of Lenard, it was clear that Lenard’s position on the discovery of X-rays
was unchanged. On that occasion, he had expressed the same birthing metaphor as he
had written but even more directly. He was the true “mother of the X-rays.” Lenard’s
work had guided Roentgen to the point that “All Roentgen had to do was push a button,
since all the groundwork had been prepared by me. . . . Without my help, the discovery
of X-rays would not have been possible even today. Without me, the name of Roentgen
would be unknown.”

The second interview continued for some time in the same vein. Lenard was in high
spirits at the interest the American soldier showed in his life. They were covering
well-trod ground when Lenard made an additional claim. Speaking of the history of
cathode ray tubes, he credited Hittorf with the initial invention, then added, “But
nothing of great importance was added to it until my work twenty-five years later.
I was always too modest and did not rush into print. In my letter to Roentgen, where
I praised him for his great discovery [the letter of May 21, 1897], I thought he would
reply that he really owed it all to me and my tube, but I waited for this acknowledgement
from him in vain.”

Etter was stunned. He recognized in that instant that this was the main source of
Lenard’s resentment for Roentgen—not that Roentgen had scooped him on the discovery
but that he felt slighted by not having been invited to share the glory. Was this
all of what had motivated Lenard’s long crusade to minimize Roentgen’s achievement?
Or was there something even more nefarious? Etter was well aware that Lenard had had
a hand in war crimes against Jewish academics. He had read something of Lenard’s rambling
polemic detailing his beliefs concerning the degeneracy of the Jewish race in his
introduction to
Deutsche Physik
. Etter wondered if there might also be an element of anti-Semitism involved in his
perception of Roentgen. He asked the question directly, “Was Roentgen a Jew?”

Lenard replied, “No, but he was a friend of Jews and acted like one.”

There was little more to say. As Etter stood to leave, Lenard asked that the Lieutenant
Colonel wait just a moment and left the room. He returned a couple of minutes later
and formally presented Etter with a photographic portrait of himself taken three years
previously on his eightieth birthday. It had been a marvelous day for Lenard, immensely
brightened by a personal congratulatory communication from Adolf Hitler. The portrait
depicted Lenard in formal attire, his chin lifted proudly, his eyes gazing skyward.
On the back of the photograph, Lenard had inscribed, “Dr. Etter, the representative
of the conqueror, with thanks for his scientific interest. 20 Sept. 45,” and signed
it “P. Lenard.”

“Your Majesty, Your Royal Highness, Ladies and Gentlemen,” announced Professor A.
Lindstedt. “The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to give this year’s
Nobel Prize for physics to Dr. Philipp Lenard, Professor at the University of Kiel,
for his important work on cathode rays.” Lenard stood beside Lindstedt. At the mention
of his name, he bent slightly at the waist and favored the audience with a thin, tight-lipped
smile.

The presentation of the Nobel Prizes on this dark, cold evening of December 10, 1905,
had filled every seat of the main concert hall of Stockholm’s Academy of Music. Sweden’s
King Oscar II and his Queen, Sophia of Nassau, sat behind Lindstedt and Lenard on
the stage, seemingly intent on the distinguished scientist’s every pronouncement.
King Oscar was a patron of science and culture, and was himself an amateur writer
and musician. He had taken a very personal interest in the Nobel ceremonies since
they’d begun five years earlier, when Alfred Nobel’s heirs had finally exhausted the
available legal obstructions to exercising the dictates of the great man’s will.

Having invented dynamite and holding three hundred fifty-five other patents at the
time of his death in 1896, Nobel had been a very wealthy man. His last will, signed
the previous year at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris, left the majority of his
fortune—roughly 31.6 million Swedish kronor (equivalent to about USD $255 million
in 2013)—for the establishment of a fund. The interest from the fund was to be used
to award significant monetary prizes that Nobel hoped would both incentivize important
work and recognize the achievements of men and women that “shall have conferred the
greatest benefit on mankind.” More specifically, Nobel’s will stipulated that the
interest accrued from his bequest, each year, be divided among persons “who shall
have made the most important discovery or invention” within the fields of physics,
chemistry, and medicine or physiology; “who shall have produced in the field of literature
the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”; and who had most contributed to
activities intended to promote peace among nations.

Lindstedt continued with his introduction of Lenard,

The discovery of the cathode rays forms the first link in the chain of brilliant discoveries
with which the names of Roentgen, Becquerel, and Curie are connected. The discovery
itself was made by Hittorf as long ago as 1869 and therefore falls in a period before
that which the Nobel Foundation is able to take into account. However, the recognition
which Lenard has earned himself by the further development of Hittorf’s discovery
(which is becoming of increasing importance) shows that he too deserves the same reward
as has already come to several of his successors for work of a similar nature.

Lindstedt laid out the background of experimentation that preceded and influenced
Lenard’s work, then ticked off the principal contributions that had brought Lenard
to the exalted state of Nobel Prize honoree. Perhaps foremost, Lenard had, in a sense,
reinvented the cathode ray tube and made its use more efficient by replacing the glass
at the cathode end of the tube with a thin aluminum plate. The plate allowed the rays
to pass through so that “it became possible to study cathode rays under much simpler
and more convenient experimental conditions than before.” He found no differences
in the rays within the tube versus those that had passed through the aluminum window.
Moreover, the cathode rays “proved to be carriers of negative electricity even in
empty space, and they could be deflected from their path by both magnetic and electrical
fields.” Finally, Lenard found differences among the cathode rays based on the extent
to which they were generated in a vacuum and could be deflected by a magnet.

In wrapping up, Lindstedt projected the future importance of Lenard’s discoveries.
His research raised questions about how cathode rays were propagated. Were they supported
by an ether, as Lenard proposed? Or perhaps, as the Englishman Crookes had suggested,
the rays were comprised of electrons moving at very high speeds. “It is clear,” Lindstedt
concluded, “that Lenard’s work on cathode rays has not only enriched our knowledge
of these phenomena, but has also served in many respects as a basis for the development
of the electron theory. Lenard’s discovery that cathode rays can exist outside the
discharge tube, in particular, has opened up new fields of research in physics.”

As Lindstedt completed his remarks, he turned to Lenard, shook his hand, and spoke
a few personal congratulatory words. The Swede crossed the stage to hand King Oscar
the ornate certificate and gold medal symbolizing the award, and the King, in turn,
presented them to Lenard. Lenard smiled broadly to receive the applause of the crowd.

As he returned to his seat, he thought he should feel more exhilarated, but it was
all over so quickly, his moment in the sun. The papers would carry the story of the
ceremony in the morning, but nothing would really change for him. A few days hence,
the general public will already have forgotten the name Lenard. Still, how many men
in their lifetime received such an honor? And there was the prize money to consider—one
hundred-thirty eight thousand Swedish kronor—which, with the expense of having a family,
was sorely needed. He forced a smile, but it didn’t feel quite right. In all fairness,
he really should have received the very first Nobel Prize, the one Roentgen had stolen
from him in 1901. At the very least, he had deserved to share it with Roentgen.

Lenard had heard what he knew to be more than a rumor. The committee responsible
for vetting the nominations for the physics prize had recommended that he and Roentgen
share the 1901 award, but the committee had been voted down by the main assembly on
a technicality. A faction of the assembly had argued that, at least for the first
prize, there should be only a single honoree. Roentgen might have stepped forward
and voiced his support for Lenard; he’d had every opportunity to give the proper credit.
Instead, Roentgen had been greedy and showed his true colors. He had been so wrapped
up in the public acclaim for his discovery that he’d forgotten it was purely an accident.
No one would ever have heard of Roentgen except that Lenard’s work had led him by
his nose to the obvious. Apparently, rightfully sharing the responsibility for the
discovery of X-rays never occurred to him. Worse. Perhaps it did.

He felt a small thrill of pride over the Nobel Prizes awarded to his countrymen who
followed him onto the stage—Adolf von Baeyer for his work in organic chemistry and
Robert Koch, who received the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for his research
into the pathogenesis of tuberculosis. Germans had swept the prizes in the sciences,
the only ones that mattered.

A Pole had won the Prize for literature. Lenard looked again at his program to remind
himself of the man’s name. Henryk Sienkiewicz. The presenter, this time a man introduced
as the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, had prattled on inanely about what
really was nothing more than inconsequential scribbling. The way the presenter was
gushing over the new laureate was embarrassing: “in every nation there are some rare
geniuses who concentrate in themselves the spirit of the nation.” Rubbish! And then,
“Their inspiration is deeply rooted in the past, like the oak tree of Baublis in the
desert of Lithuania.” What effete babble! He had known since childhood that mathematics
and the natural sciences were all that really mattered. He had written that these
subjects were the “oases within the desert. . . . All the getting up at four in the
morning and going to bed at midnight was of no use—history and geography did not enter
my head.”

There had been more speeches that night, but Lenard hardly paid them any attention.
It was amazing, the unexpected twists that had brought him to such grand heights.
His father had wanted him to take over the family wine business. Lenard had hated
the very idea of it. There had been quite a few arguments over his resistance. To
appease the old man, he’d given it a try after his initial scientific training. He’d
read some biographies of famous scientists whose investigations were sidelights to
other careers. Perhaps he could emulate them. In the end, he couldn’t do it. Working
in a business had been beneath him, so bourgeois, so Jewish. Jews were said to be
good at business. He wasn’t so sure. His father’s partner had been a Jew, a man named
Leban, but still the business had failed.

Science had been his first and only love. As a boy, he had routinely saved some of
the small allowance his parents gave him. When he had saved enough, he wandered down
to the Krapp brothers’ bookshop at the edge of Pressburg’s Jewish quarter and spent
his money on whatever science book caught his attention. It was an awful shame when
the store went under. He’d gone to Steiner’s after that. By then, his interest in
science was in full flight. He had built a chemistry laboratory in his parents’ garden
and conducted experiments. Years later, when he was in high school, his teacher, Virgil
Klatt, had taken him under his wing. During school and even on holidays, they had
performed hundreds of experiments together, reproducing Becquerel’s work with phosphorescent
stones.

He’d tried to take his doctoral degree at the University of Budapest but wasn’t admitted.
Bunsen accepted him at Heidelberg, where he received his degree with high honors in
1886. By then, he’d already established a reputation as a man who bore watching. Still,
it hadn’t been easy finding a permanent position until Kiel had taken a chance on
him. He’d spent a year or two in each of a number of temporary positions—Berlin with
Helmholtz, then Budapest, Aachen, and Breslau, before his temporary appointment at
Heidelberg in 1896. By this point in his career, he’d already been credited with what
was called the “waterfall effect” by some and the “Lenard effect” by others. He had
to admit that the latter had a nice ring to it. His experiments had revealed the separation
of positive and negative electrical charges as water droplets broke up while falling
through the atmosphere, and described the differing shapes of water droplets depending
on their size.