I would like to begin by returning to some of the points that have already been made by Professor Jones. It is difficult in retrospect to remember the very small budgets which were available for university research in physics before the war. The Cavendish was the largest and most celebrated laboratory in England but Rutherford never spent more than £2,500 a year on his research programme. He resisted suggestions that an industrial appeal might provide him with more money and he did not believe in the economic importance of any of the work he was doing. He used to boast that ‘we have no money, so we shall have to think’. [My corollary: “and because thought is so dangerous, if one does have money, it is a false economy to think instead of spending it & saving precious thought for problems which are not so easy they can be solved by mere money.”]

When I went to the Cavendish there were 10 Nobel Prizemen and future Prizemen on the staff. Most of our apparatus was crude and simple. I don’t think any other university will ever produce so many Nobel Prizemen so cheaply. The foreman of the Laboratory, Mr Lincoln, was extraordinarily mean; he used to give me tungsten wire by the inch at a time when it cost a few pence a yard. I used to measure radioactive sources with a home-made electroscope which I charged by rubbing my fountain pen in my back hair. I remember going with W. B. Lewis to buy a valve for 15s. from Bailey, Grundy & Barrett’s and we were so elated by our good fortune that we celebrated the event on the way back to the Laboratory. [apparently a local construction company, so a regular fluid valve, not a vacuum valve] A few years later both of us were using valves by the million. [for uranium refining?]

…I am sure that undergraduate teaching in Cambridge was as good as, if not better, than any to be found anywhere else in the world, but in those days some of the ordinary pass degrees were of a standard which was so low that one can hardly imagine it today. I think some of the most scholarly and some of the most unscholarly men of their generation graduated as Bachelors of Arts from Cambridge in my time. The idea of a scholarly elitist population had never been heard of in those days.

…When the Tizard Committee went to America to explain the secrets of radar to American scientists, President Roosevelt asked Alfred Loomis [cf. Alvarez1980] to entertain them. Loomis was a wealthy and very successful amateur scientist, he was a member of the Corporation of MIT. and he knew about its Department of Industrial Cooperation and its contracts branch. He suggested that American research in radar should not be done in [military] Service establishments such as Wright Field, which was very much like Farnborough or TRE, but that it should be concentrated in a special laboratory to be built in and administered by MIT. This was the beginning of the Radiation Laboratory which dominated the American research programme in this field.

…After the war, Vannevar Bush wrote a notable report called ‘Science the endless frontier’ for President Roosevelt. He pointed out that American industry had always depended on fundamental research done in Europe. Europe was in ruins so America would have to embark on a major expansion of fundamental research. The details of the atomic energy project were still a closely guarded secret, but he referred to the enormous achievements of science during the war, particularly in the fields of radar and medicine. Bush hoped for further developments in medicine, but above all he hoped that the Government would develop both undergraduate and postgraduate schools of science and engineering in all the major universities of America. Several university presidents travelled with a bag of gold to buy the best of the European scientists who had survived the war. I talked to some of them about the difficulty of buying and transporting an institution as distinct from an individual, but they were perfectly confident that they could do this if they had to.

As a result of Bush’s initiative and the actions of the American Government the centre of gravity of scientific research moved across the Atlantic, where it has been ever since…It is an extraordinary thing that some of the best fundamental research in the world has been paid for because it was ostensibly ‘important to the defence of the Continental United States’. Astonishing though it may appear, this is why so many of the best graduate schools in the world are in the United States today.

…I happened to be there at the time and I remember the hysteria with which the announcement was greeted. After Sputnik the panic stricken Government poured enormous sums of money into universities and schools; funds were available for every conceivable research project, good or bad. The waste and inefficiency which resulted may have caused some of the troubles which beset American universities today.

The scale on which American universities developed is still not understood or even comprehended in this country. For many years MIT disposed of greater resources for its research programme than all the English universities put together and the reputation of MIT did a great deal to force our own Government into action.

…I must now pass to another problem which interests me very greatly and that is the effect of the war on the scientists as distinct from science. The extraordinary thing about wartime science is that most of it was done by very young men. Many of those who are present in this room worked on radar during the war in their twenties or their very early thirties. It would be invidious of me to mention names, but there is no doubt that men who are here with us now developed techniques without which we should probably have lost the War. Our own defence against German air attack, the bombing offensive against Germany, and the battle against submarines in the Bay of Biscay [see The Operations Evaluation Group on the Battle of the Atlantic], all depended completely on the skill and the enterprise of men who are here this afternoon. Some of them associated on terms of equality with the Chiefs of the Armed Services and attended meetings of the Cabinet where they sometimes had to argue a case against the sustained opposition of the Prime Minister’s official advisers. No young man who has ever done that will ever be intimidated by a Professor or by any Vice-Chancellor I have ever met!

Great responsibilities can have a profound effect on very young men. I wonder how much of the success of many of the scientists who distinguished themselves after the war was due to their understanding and mastery of men and not, as they fondly believe, to their mastery of fundamental scientific principles or even the new techniques which the war did so much to encourage. Some men seem to have burned themselves out during the war and done little or nothing since. Others might never have made their mark had it not been for the tremendous stimulus of the war. There was no one for young men to turn to for advice, so they were forced to do the most astonishing things, some of which their elders knew to be impossible. Many of us had to carry more real responsibility then than we have ever had in our maturity. I often wonder how young men can be given similar opportunities today. We used to think that a man was too old at 35. Now we are apt to assume that men of 35 are too young to be appointed senior lecturers. There are few professors of less than 40, and an old man is still someone who is more than 3 years older than we are!

Does lack of opportunity embitter some of our potential heroes; men like those who in another context were once described as ‘mute, inglorious Miltons’? Perhaps some things are only possible in wartime. Alexander the Great died sighing for new worlds to conquer before he was 30; Napoleon Bonaparte had conquered Italy before he was old enough to become an established lecturer in an English university and Nelson was a post-captain responsible for the lives of hundreds of men at the age of 20. No English under-graduate of that age can do more than cox an eight. But during the war young men rose to high ranks in all the fighting services in every belligerent country. An enterprising statistician has discovered that the average age of men who graduated as Ph.D.s from Harvard increased by two or 3 months every year during the 15 years 1950^–₁₅1965_59ya. He also discovered that the average age at which Harvard men retire has been falling steadily at about the same rate during the same period. If one extrapolates these two curves, and even Fellows of this Ancient Society have confidently extrapolated much less reliable data, it appears that they will intersect before the end of the century, and after that men may graduate when they have retired or retire before they graduate.

It is easy for us to be too nostalgic, and perhaps even nostalgia isn’t what it was! But we must remind ourselves that most of us were young men during World War II and that we have been growing old gracefully or disgracefully ever since. We shall never know what the war really did for us, but there is no doubt that it changed our lives and those of all our fellow scientists; it changed our attitude to science and it changed our attitude to authority. Which of these changes has had the greatest effect on science itself, I do not know.

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