Read Ebook: White Lightning by Lewis Edwin Herbert

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Ebook has 2528 lines and 83314 words, and 51 pages

What were those flashes? How could he learn more about them? He must wait till he had enough physics to follow the writings of a man named Rutherford.

He was sorry to wait, but he was glad that some human being was at work on the job. He went home full of wonder and impatience. He never forgot the marvelous show. All through the year he kept seeing those immortal fireflies charging the darkness and wasting energy. He no longer broke the law by helping his mates with their mathematics, but spent extra time each day in reading mathematics beyond the requirements.

And so his high-school years went by. Athletics and girls, Latin and French and German went far to divert his mind from the mysteries of radium.

It was not until 1911, when he was about to graduate and enter Yale, that he ran on an article by the mysterious Rutherford and found himself able to understand some of it.

He had long since learned that even solid iron is full of spaces, and that within the spaces are minute particles in constant motion. He was now to learn that the minute particles are themselves hollow--that an atom is a central nucleus of positive electricity which holds in its sky one or more moons of negative electricity.

In other words, the cheek of a girl, which feels so smooth to the lips, is really a starry sky full of electric suns and moons. The tension between each sun and its moons is all that keeps the cheek from exploding when you kiss it. And here he had been calling them all "darlin'"! Well, he might have known that girls were composed of electricity. He had often felt it thrilling up his arm.

An atom of hydrogen was one charge of positive electricity balanced by one charge of negative. At least, he guessed that if you could ever get a hydrogen atom off by itself, it could be called a balance. But it was not a perfect balance, for the touch of fire would make the moon slip off and combine with the moons of oxygen in a sharp explosion.

An atom of helium was heavier, as if four positive charges were balanced by four negatives. Rutherford did not tell the young mind just how those four positive charges--which would naturally fly apart--were cemented into the nucleus, but Marvin guessed that two of the negatives did the work, leaving two moons in the sky. This balance was very strong. The gas never burns or explodes, and can be pressed into a liquid so cold that it boils far below the point where mercury freezes.

A girl composed entirely of helium would be perfectly neutral, incapable of sending out one flash or thrill. All the girls he knew were composed of flesh and blood, which of course were chemical substances but very far from neutral.

Now at last he understood what those flashes of light from the radium had been and still were, for the bombardment was steadily going on there in the dark corner of the hospital. They were the reflection of helium atoms that had lost two moons and came shooting out of the radium to find them. They would pick up the two missing satellites and again become the quiet inert gas. What bully stuff to put in a balloon, if only there were enough of it!

He wondered just how much electricity lay packed in the nucleus of a radium atom. The nucleus of every atom evidently carried a charge, an excess of positive over negative. He used to go up into the den, from which his father was generally absent, and think about it. He would pick up that old sieve of phosphor bronze and tilt it to an angle of thirty degrees and look at the minerals in the cabinet. If he could only get a spectrum from the positive electricity concealed in the heart of each atom, he could number the elements from hydrogen up. Just now they went by weights, but ought not cobalt to come before nickel, even if it was heavier? Cobalt was more like iron, and ought to come right after iron.

He had chosen Yale in the hope of sometime studying under Boltwood, the chemist who first perceived that the metal radium slowly changes into lead. As a mere freshman he presented himself in Dr. Boltwood's office, was sharply questioned, was recognized as being something more than a freshman, and received the smiling suggestion that he master differential equations and vector analysis. This he proceeded to do with delight.

Time slipped along, and as a sophomore he took to reading mineralogy. Now iron, copper, silver, gold, lead, and tungsten are to be found in Connecticut, and on days of leisure Marvin took to roaming among their haunts.

Thus it happened that one afternoon in the spring of 1913 he found himself coming over the hill from Lotteryville to Wickford, and looking down on old orchards that seemed like petalite tipped with pink lithium-mica. The nearest one was just below him, and as he passed it on the way down he saw the gable end of an old mansion.

Also through a window he caught a glimpse of chemical apparatus, and somewhere out of doors he heard a girl practicing vocal scales. He guessed that the mansion had been converted into a school for girls. It was not colonial, but looked as if it had been lifted by magic from some British park and set down here in Connecticut.

Descending to the road which passed before the estate, he perceived that its great yard was filled with sweetbrier. Then he heard the singing voice burst into an aria from an opera that he knew by heart.

Differential equations in the head of a youth do not check his springtime impulses, and at the right moment he answered that impassioned caroling in kind. Straightway a maiden appeared at the gate in the high stone wall. She was a vivid creature, and her rare-ripe beauty surpassed anything he could recall.

"Hello, Carmen."

"Hello, Escamillo. What are you doing so far from home?"

"Looking for trouble, I guess. Don't they let you sing indoors?"

"No, we have wigwams."

"May I come into your wigwam?"

"Too risky. Miss Coggeshall watches us as close as her great-great-something-or-other watched the Injuns when he was governor of Rhode Island."

"What do you call your prison?"

"Eglantine. It was once a pigpen."

"No savvy."

"Why, this was the home of an Englishman named Hogg. Miss Kate uses his gunroom for her office. Are you from New Haven?"

"Yes, darlin'."

"And you don't know Jimmy?"

"Didn't even know he was sick."

"Well, Jimmy is the grandson, and I wish you would look him up. He's a soph, and when he's home he lives in Wickford, and his mother has got the gout, and he never never brings any Yale men up here. There's sixty of us, Escamillo."

"If I come, will you promise me all the dances for the first evening?"

"I will, sure as my name is Cynthia Flory."

"I'll come, sure as my name is Marvin Mahan."

They prattled over the gate, and the pink of her dark cheek grew deeper. She was like musk and musk-roses. She was like the red flame of lithium.

On his return to New Haven he sought out James Endicott Hogg, whose grandfather had been British, and found him an exceedingly quiet fellow. Jimmy was blond and near-sighted and wore nose-glasses. Jimmy was going to be a mechanical engineer and was already designing safety devices.

The two men were so unlike that they took to each other at once. After the summer vacation they managed to get into one course together, and by the first of the new year they were rooming together. Week-end invitations to Wickford became a regular recurrence in Marvin's life.

Jimmy's widowed mother recognized in the visitor just the sort of influence needed to draw her only son out of his shell. Nothing pleased her more than to see Marvin carry Jimmy off for a dance at Eglantine and bring him back more like other men. She had got but little good out of the old home since she sold it to Kate Coggeshall, and had long felt that it ought at least to serve as an experiment station for Jimmy. He was so utterly guileless in everything but business that he was likely to be ensnared by the first creature who should perceive his earning capacity.

And what of Marvin and Cynthia? All that spring of 1914 they flirted outrageously and were never once summoned to the old gunroom to be lectured. Kate Coggeshall had made the dramatic Cynthia out of nothing--had even taught her the multiplication table before allowing her to plunge into music--and was convinced that these two young folks were but playing parts in an opera.

The judgment was approximately correct, at least for the time being. To Cynthia he was still a sort of Escamillo who had dropped down out of the sky. As for Marvin, he knew that he was playing with fire, but thought himself safe. Cynthia was like the high-frequency electrons which he had learned to handle in the laboratory--the sort which at a pressure of half a million volts will kiss the experimenter's lips without burning them.

There was certainly nothing designing in Cynthia. She might perhaps have thrown her toils about Jimmy, but she was content to call him a stick. She might have gone further and called him stingy, for he was never known to send sweets or flowers to anybody at Eglantine.

In matters touching family pride, however, Jimmy was more liberal. For instance, he subscribed to the expensive Philosophical Magazine because his father and his grandfather had done so before him, back to the time when in England philosophy meant physics.

And it was in Jimmy's house in June of 1914 that Marvin picked up the "Phil. Mag." and read the most important article he had ever read in his life. The author was quite unknown to him--one of Rutherford's men who signed himself H. G. J. Moseley. This man was reporting some measurements that he had made by the use of crystal gratings and short rays. He asserted that the method gave a spectrum of two dark lines for each element, and that the frequency of vibration increased definitely, step by step.

Marvin laid down the magazine and reflected. This unknown Moseley had found it--a sure way to determine the amount of electricity concealed in the heart of any atom. In ten years chemistry would be a new science. In much less than that time every chemical element would receive a number indicating the charge on the nucleus.

Moseley had already numbered some thirty elements, beginning with aluminum as 13, and calculating gold at 79.

Marvin ran over a few of the other elements in his mind and guessed the numbers they would bear. Hydrogen would be 1, helium 2, lithium 3, beryllium 4, boron 5, carbon 6, nitrogen 7, oxygen 8. If gold was 79, lead would probably be 82. Think of it--an atom of lead is a small universe of compressed lightning carrying eighty-two electric moons in its sky!

What might not this Moseley accomplish? If radium turns into helium and then into lead, why might not Moseley upset the central balance of lead and let the lightning out again? If a gram of radium emits enough energy to lift five hundred tons a mile high, a gram of disintegrated lead ought to turn every wheel in a great factory!

Marvin dashed up to Jimmy's room, where the taciturn youth was shaving, and explained. He unfolded a vision of the future. When all the coal was exhausted, power would be supplied by Moseley motors and would so enrich everybody that there would be no cause for war.

Jimmy listened, washed off the lather, rubbed his chin to see if he had missed anything, adjusted his nose-glasses, and politely informed Marvin that he was a damn fool.

All the same, the economical Jimmy proceeded to call up New Haven on long distance and inquire diligently and expensively until he learned who Moseley was. He proved to be a man not yet twenty-six, the son of an Oxford don. The fact seemed to cheer Jimmy immensely. These English lads were thoroughbreds, much better trained in mathematics than most American youths.

From that day the Moseley numbers became the background of Marvin's thinking. They presently proved that there are just ninety-two elements.

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