Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards

RADIO, RADIUM, AND X RAYS 139
Cambridge, he picked up a book just issued by the university press, Ernest
Rutherford's Radioactivity.
Rutherford's book was the first summary account of the experimental
work of Roentgen, Becquerel, Thompson, Mme. Curie, and Rutherford
himself in the decade following the discovery of radium and X rays. A
young man in Rosa's division, Liewelyn G. Hoxton, given the book to discuss
at one of the weekly meetings of the Bureau staff, recalls that when he sat
down, Dr. Rosa came over and said, "Let me see that book!" But little in
the book except the chapter on methods of measuretnent, describing the
crude "electrical method" as the best then available for the quantitative de-
termination of radiation and emanation, seems to have interested Rosa, for
he returned the book the next morning.78
A second edition of Radioactivity, enlarged by the avid research
abroad from 382 to 558 pages, appeared a year later, and Rutherford
himself, who won the 1908 Nobel prize in chemistry for his work on alpha
particles, visited the Bureau to lecture on radium and radioactivity not
long after.7° Such was the Bureau's introduction to the coming age of
nuclear physics.
Dr. Austin himself was not particularly interested in radioactivity
but in another kind of emanation and a still newer phenomenon, that of
radio telegraphy or wireless, as it was called. Radio as we know it today
was as yet remote, although in 1901, the same year that Marconi received
his wireless signals across the Atlantic, Reginald A. Fessenden, recently
appointed head of electrical engineering at the University of Pittsburgh
but still then with the U.S. Weather Bureau, heard at a distance of a mile
the first faint voice by electromagnetic waves over his wireless apparatus.8°
Six years later Lee de Forest invented his audion detector or three.element
tube and applied it to the long-distance telephone. When used in 1912 to
amplify a feeble audio-frequency current, modern radio was born.
Although experimentation continued, much of it in secrecy and
attended by barbaric litigation, voice radio remained primitive, found
no application on the battlefields of World War I, and was not developed
commercially until the 1920's. For the first two decades of the century
7°
Interview with Dr. L. G. Hoxton, Charlottesville, Va., Nov. 27—28, 1961 (NBS Historical
File). Austin's copy of Radioactivity is in the NBS library.
7°
Dr. Hoxton recalls Rutherford's visit to the Bureau. No record of the visit has been
found, but in his biography of Rutherford (Cambridge University Press, 1939, p. 129),
A. S. Eve says: "About 1905 the world caught fire and radium was the vogue. * * *
A great number of Universities and Societies poured in appeals to Rutherford to
come and lecture to them about radium. He did what he could."
°°
Helen M. Fessenden, Fesseden: Builder of Tomorrows (New York: Coward-McCann.
1940), p. 81.