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

12 AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
The visible achievements of technology and invention, though many
were still crude and far from generally available, made prophecy a game
any number could play, and with some knowledge of human nature, fore-
seeing the social changes they would bring only meant projecting the
changes already begun. Predicting the future of pure science, however,
was something else, and the few who ventured any guesses did so cautiously
and in the vaguest of terms.
One who ventured was John Trowbridge, director of the Jefferson
Physical Laboratory at Harvard. The work of Maxwell, Hertz, Roentgen,
and Thomson between 1873 and 1897, in demonstrating the electromagnetic
nature of light and formulating the concept of the electron, in mass much
less than one-thousandth part of the chemist's lightest known atom, had almost
certainly, said Trowbridge, made the study of the infinitely small the new
direction science would take.
The word "electronics" had not been invented, and Professor Trow-
bridge saw no "use" in the study of the electron yet, except as it might
possibly lead to an answer to an unexpected problem recently encountered.
This was in the electrolytic effects observed in Boston, where the iron mains
carrying water under Boylston Street had been found badly corroded by the
electric current of the trolley system. The investigation of this phenomenon,
declared Trowbridge, "has laid the foundation of a new branch of science,
that of physical chemistry, which promises to be one of the most important
sciences in the world." Electrochemistry, the branch of physical chemistry
concerned with electrolysis, seemed to Trowbridge certain to provide the
key to exploration of the nature of the smallest particles of matter yet
found.'3
But the world of electronics and the physicist's exploration of the
atom was still far off. For the most part, the world of science in 1900 had
little conception of the truly revolutionary ideas to come. Robert A. Millikan
was to say that of the basic principles of universal order taught at the end
of the 19th century, not one but its universal validity was to be questioned
by serious and competent physicists, while most were definitely proved to be
subject to exceptions. In 1895, the very year some physicists were declaring
that "the great discoveries in physics have all been made," that the field
of physics was "dead," Roentgen announced his discovery of X rays. A
year later came Becquerel's discovery of the radioactivity of uranium,
marking the birth of nuclear physics, and in 1897, J. J. Thomson in England
established beyond question the existence of electrons as fundamental con-
13 John Trowbridge, "The study of the infinitely small," Atlantic, 89, 612 (1902).
Professor Trowbridge, a physicist and specialist in electricity, was director of the
Jefferson Physical Laboratory from 1888 to 1910.