The Man Who Stalked Einstein (14 page)

He’d begun his work with cathode ray tubes when he was with Helmholtz, in Berlin,
during 1888. His invention of the “Lenard window,” while he was still in his twenties,
had made his career. The window was simply an opening in the cathode end of the glass
tube covered by a thin aluminum foil that allowed better egress of the cathode rays
outside the tube for improved study. It was only a short step from this point to his
discovery of the photoelectric effect. He’d found that the interaction of ultraviolet
light and a metal plate caused the release of energy according to the frequency of
the light. The result surprised him, as he had expected there to be a much stronger
correlation with the intensity of the light; the exact nature of the relationship
remained obscure. Had he heard that there was a young man in Zurich who had worked
on this exact problem? It seemed to him that he had.

His path to success had been a long road with many false turns and disappointments,
but he had persevered. The universities that had not kept him on the faculty, that
had encouraged him to try elsewhere, had made a grave mistake. The Nobel Prize was
proof of that.

Lenard was roused from his thoughts by people standing and moving around him. The
presentation ceremony was over. Lindstedt was hovering, greeting the sycophants wishing
to have a word with him as though he had been the one awarded the prize. He saw in
the distance the royals, Oscar and Sophia, leaving with their retinue for the banquet.
The crowd trailed, looking wolfish, as though they had not eaten in days.

Lenard followed the crowd outside to the dining room of a nearby hotel and found
his assigned place among the hundreds of dinner guests. Despite his mood, he couldn’t
help but marvel at the surrounding finery. The women wore long gowns of every imaginable
color and design, many purchased at the best Parisian shops. Adding to their elegance,
they had donned their finest wool and fur stoles, white gloves that ascended their
arms to their elbows and beyond, and glittering gems retrieved earlier that day from
household vaults and secret hiding places scattered among the best neighborhoods in
Stockholm.

In contrast, the men were nearly uniformly attired, each wearing, as he was, a long-tailed,
black cutaway jacket paired with matching slacks featuring black cords up the outside
of the legs, a stiff white shirt with a white wing collar, and either white or silver
cuff links and shirt studs. The more rakish sported a white pocket square conservatively
extruding just the slightest amount from their left breast pocket.

Lenard seated himself and greeted the guests beside and across from him. The ballroom
was dazzling. Long rectangular tables were lined up end to end in long, straight rows
and covered with expensive linens. Arrangements of exotic flowers, imported from warmer
climes, soared upward at regular intervals. Each guest’s place had been set with fine
china, an array of silverware, organized from the periphery inward to receive each
course in order, and a selection of leaded Orrefors crystal, gleaming in candlelight.
Less than a decade old, the company had designed special glassware to commemorate
the event. Each style was specifically shaped to maximize the enjoyment of the wine
that would accompany each serving.

Suddenly, from the kitchen, came a burst of activity. Gaggles of waiters, dressed
in dinner jackets and carrying decorative bowls of beef consommé, circled behind the
diners to reach over their left shoulders and deposit their burdens. The same choreography
brought forth, at intervals, a sequence of filet of sole, saddle of lamb, hot and
cold partridge, and hearts of artichoke, followed by ice cream, pastry and fruit.
Each course was paired with a carefully selected wine—Golden Sherry, Chateau Doutor,
a Hochheimer white wine, champagne by Mumm, Romanee from Burgundy, Apollonaris with
dessert, and Sandeman port with cigars. The remarkable display of excess emphasized
the day’s theme: these were extraordinary men who had earned this evening’s special
culinary tribute.

Lord knows, he had done the work—and then he had waited. Only a very select group
of scientists had the right to make Nobel nominations: members of the Nobel physics
committee or of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences; past Nobel laureates; professors
of physics in Scandinavian countries; and holders of chairs in a selected cadre of
Scandinavian institutions. Lenard’s name had been bruited around the assembly as a
candidate from the start. In 1901, all five members of the physics committee had suggested
both his name and Roentgen’s. He had received additional support from the British
physicist and mathematician Sylvanus Thompson, a foreign member of the Swedish Academy,
but it had not been enough to carry the day. For the next four years, a man who would
become his collaborator in his quest to prove the existence of ether, Vilhelm Bjerknes,
nominated him for the prize. In 1904, two other scientists—Wiener and Hallwachs—had
placed his name in nomination, although they both proffered additional nominations
at the same time.

This year, it had been Bjerknes again, but also Jacobus van’t Hoff, the Dutch professor
who had won the very first prize for chemistry. It must have been van’t Hoff who had
done the trick. It galled Lenard that it had taken so long for the Nobel committee
to recognize him. Professor Lindstedt had unwittingly made the case in his introduction,
saying Lenard was responsible for providing the foundation from which Roentgen’s and
the Curies’ research had sprung. His work had come first; he had led the way. Then
he had looked on from the sidelines as each of those who had followed and benefited
from his discoveries had been selected before him. Yet, despite Lenard’s work lying
at the root of so much of modern physics, there had been no mass acclaim for him as
there had been for Roentgen, and for Becquerel and the Curies too, for that matter.

What initially had been an almost inconsequential slight had inadvertently been imprinted
on his consciousness by Professor Lindstedt. Now, he could not let it go. That the
others had prospered by feeding off his ideas rankled to such an extent that by May
28 of the following year, when Lenard returned to Stockholm to deliver the traditional
Nobel Lecture, “On Cathode Rays,” he was ready to set the record straight. He had
stood by and watched Roentgen take the credit for what was rightfully his for long
enough.

“I shall now speak not only of the fruits but also of the trees which have borne
them, and of those who planted these trees,” Lenard began. “This approach is the more
suitable in my case, as I have by no means always been numbered among those who pluck
the fruit; I have been repeatedly only one of those who planted or cared for the trees,
or who helped to do this.”

The lecture progressed historically through his research, addressing how cathode
rays varied according to different combinations of metals and tube designs until he
reached this particularly salient passage: “It is barely worth mentioning, but not
unimportant for the further development of our subject, that even before this interruption
[the death of his mentor, Heinrich Hertz], I had designed a new and far more convenient
type of discharge tube. I had tested it as far as possible and had recommended its
use and made it generally available.”

Lenard’s tube employed platinum as the cathode target, which he claimed was the material
that produced the greatest number of X-rays. Between the efficiency of the platinum
plate and his tube design, which allowed the X-rays generated by the high-energy electrons
striking the plate to freely exit the tube, he dismissively concluded, “The discovery
soon after this of X-rays by Roentgen, the first investigator to use the type of tube
described above, is generally considered to be a good example of a lucky discovery.
But, given the tube, the fact that the attention of the observer was already turned
from the interior to the outside of the tube, and the presence of phosphorescent screens
outside the tube, because of the purpose of the tube, it appeared to me that this
discovery had of necessity to be made at this stage of development.” In plain language,
Lenard was claiming that it was his work had led Roentgen to his discovery. Any fool
could have done it. It just so happened that Roentgen was the fool who did.

This indictment of Roentgen as merely “lucky” and beholden to Lenard for his good
fortune was a typical one for Lenard. In time, Lenard would come to have similar complaints
about Einstein and his law of the photoelectric effect. Ironically, in 1905, the same
year that Lenard sat on the Nobel stage, the scientific world would read Albert Einstein’s
article in
Annalen der Physik
on the law of the photoelectric effect. It had been Lenard who had first written
about the curious effect several years earlier, but he had not been able to elucidate
the physical laws that governed it. Using the constant derived by Max Planck, it was
left to Einstein to bring forth the relationship between the wavelength, or frequency,
of ultraviolet light striking a metal plate and the kinetic energy of the electrons
released as a result.

Given that he was widely celebrated as one of the great scientists of his era, it
seems surprising that Philipp Lenard so begrudged the recognition accorded the contributions
of his contemporaries. However, this was his character. Toward the end of his career,
Lenard kept a
Faelschungs-Buch
, a cataloging of what he believed were the ideas stolen from him by his colleagues.
A handwritten note found within the covers of the book states,

They who could have understood my works most easily have obviously never appreciated
[what I have done]. This was astonishing to me; however, I understood it soon enough
by their and their students’ statements in their publications. They aggressively tried
as much to conceal me as to tacitly rob me! How do they come to behave like that?
. . . They probably have all been that way, these “colleagues.” Thus they could not
be delighted by my works, their methods and results; but they were anxious for their
pleasant positions, and so a counter fight seemed to be the best for them in the first
place! So they behaved in any case.

Despite the stilted, archaic style of writing, Lenard’s disappointment, even anger,
over the behavior of his fellow academics is palpable. He appears to have given up
on them. He is writing for posterity.

The here preserved publications show it. I have preserved them and continue to do
so, because they are tangible proof of a behavior (which one probably has to have
at hand) which seemed so alien to me that I even sometimes had to (being forgetful)
consider as incredible. . . . There are some publications, which only followed the
recent widely employed trend to bypass me. One, even a pupil of mine, deceived me
from behind, because he deemed it beneficial for himself. . . . That they have been
able to behave in the way they did, these poor minds owe to the Jewish influence,
which became effective just in time and by which their petty-minded thinking became
as strong, as they could ever wish for.

On the occasion of his Nobel Lecture, he felt it necessary to give voice to his resentment
over the acclaim Roentgen enjoyed for his discovery. One can only imagine the embarrassed
response of his audience: Philipp Lenard, the great scientist, a Nobel laureate, denigrating
the contributions of another Nobel Prize recipient in an effort to bolster his own
legacy.

Lenard’s behavior toward Roentgen and, later, Einstein would follow him through history.
Indeed, instead of being remembered for the genius of his science, his legacy is his
misbegotten racial theories and how they negatively impacted the future of German
science. His modern-day Nobel biography notes, “Some of his discoveries were great
ones and others were very important, but he claimed for them more than their true
value. Although he was given many honours . . . he believed that he was disregarded
and this probably explains why he attacked other physicists in many countries.”

Seventeen years following Lenard’s Nobel Lecture, on the afternoon of July 11, 1923,
Albert Einstein looked out from the elevated podium fronting Jubileum Hall, prepared
to deliver his own Nobel Lecture. The newly finished building was an architectural
marvel, completely walled in glass, and one of the focal points of Gothenburg’s Liseberg
Congress Center, which, along with the neighboring amusement park, had been constructed
to celebrate the city’s three hundredth anniversary. For the next hour, those fortunate
or persistent enough to have gotten a ticket forsook the park’s funicular and slides
to listen to the 1921 Nobel laureate for physics.

The day was an unusually hot one for central Sweden, hot enough that Einstein’s neck
must have prickled under his stiff, white collar. The freshly lacquered benches on
which the audience sat stuck to the trousers of their expensive wool suits. Even so,
roughly one thousand scientists, dignitaries, and guests sat mesmerized through the
roughly hour-long presentation. Among them was Sweden’s King Gustav V, who occupied
a special chair in the central aisle separating the left and right sections.

Beyond the unseasonable warmth, there were several interesting oddities about the
circumstances of Einstein’s celebratory lecture. First, Einstein had known about his
being awarded the Nobel Prize for nearly a year, but only now was he getting around
to delivering his lecture. Second, the award Einstein received was the 1921 Nobel
Prize for physics, a year already fogged by distant memory. Stalemated discussions
among the Nobel physics committee members over who should be the recipient of the
1921 physics award resulted in the prize being held in reserve until a decision was
made during the committee’s usual deliberations held in 1922. Third, Einstein’s host
in Gothenburg, Svante Arrhenius, had on several occasions in his capacity as a member
of the Nobel physics committee assessed Einstein’s dossier as unworthy of a Nobel
Prize. Arrhenius had arranged for Einstein’s lecture to be the sole event of a special
plenary session of the meeting of the Nordic Assembly of Naturalists. Finally, the
topic of Einstein’s lecture, entitled “Fundamental Ideas and Problems of the Theory
of Relativity,” was unrelated to the scientific contribution for which Einstein was
awarded the Nobel Prize.