The Age of Radiance (2 page)

When uranium ore is left atop photographic paper, it leaves the image of a rock veined in energy, of matter seeming to pulse with life. Hold silvery plutonium in your hand and it feels warm as a puppy . . . a big enough lump will boil its own water. The meltdown of runaway nuclear reactors, meanwhile, results in what physicist Robert Socolow describes as
“afterheat, the fire that you can’t put out, the generation of heat from fission fragments now and weeks from now and months from now.” A fire that, unchecked, becomes eternal. And say what you will about the less than pleasant qualities of nuclear weapons . . . their detonations are rapturously beautiful.

Formed by stars that exploded into the gas and dust of supernovas, radiance is the main source of heat within the earth, and its force propels the tectonic shift of the continents. Its invisible rays trigger biological damage, birth defects, tumors, and cellular mayhem. Hiroshima; Godzilla; Dr. Strangelove; Nagasaki; Bikini; Spider-Man. What other history combines unimaginable horrors with genetic monstrosities, Armageddon fantasies, Hollywood tentpole grandees, and a revolution in swimwear? No wonder it’s rare today for someone not to be at least a little bit radiophobic, alarmed by this omnipresent, invisible, mythic force. Yet the same rays that cause cancer can be used to cure cancer—drink the poison, or die—and the development of the most hideous weapon in the history of humankind has wholly eroded that same humankind’s ability to wage global war against itself. Every time another country with erratic political leaders—Pakistan, North Korea, Iran—develops the ability to manufacture nuclear weapons, the world responds with grave fear. Yet, two of the greatest mass murderers in human history—Stalin and Mao—were nuclear armed and never used their atomic weapons. Sixty-five years and counting, and still the only country to ever drop the Bomb is the United States of America. The deterrent benefits have
led more than one expert on this history, after detailed analysis, to propose awarding the atomic bomb with the Nobel Peace Prize.

Before this research, you and I probably had similar thoughts about atomic energy (an eternal, potential menace) and nuclear weapons (a moral and mortal hazard). Then I found out that Chernobyl has become something of a human-free Eden, that the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are in much better health than any of us could ever have imagined, that except for the radiating blanket of fallout, nothing can be accomplished with atomic weapons that can’t be done with conventional explosives, and that Marie Curie was one hell of a broad. The very term
atomic bomb
originated with science fiction writer H. G. Wells and was taken up by the physicists of Los Alamos as something of a joke. Since everything in the material world is composed of atoms, not just nuclear weapons are atomic—all weapons are atomic, this book is atomic, and you are atomic. But when it comes to radioactivity in the modern world, this “atomic everything” paradox makes a piquant kind of sense. For example, the 2011 disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was triggered by a power failure when the emergency backup batteries, stored foolishly in the basement, were destroyed by a tsunami. That oceanic flood originated with an earthquake, which was the result of crashing tectonic plates, which moved from the pressure and heat created by radiation rising from the earth’s iron core. In the end, the Fukushima nuclear disaster was triggered by organic atomic forces . . . so in today’s world, the “joke” has reverberated back on Los Alamos. Nuclear in power, in medicine, and in weaponry has become so pervasive that it might as well be “atomic,” and the story of its birth, of nuclear’s startling rise and slow-motion collapse, of the men and women who changed our lives in ways they could never imagine, from Curie to Oppenheimer, Teller to Reagan, and “duck and cover” to Fukushima, defies belief.

T
HE
cataract of discovery that inaugurated the Atomic Age was a fifty-year revolution that transformed our scientific comprehension of matter, energy, and the essential ingredients of all that we know of the material world. Nearly every one of these great leaps forward was made, astonishingly enough, by an academic nonentity.

On the late afternoon of November 8, 1895, at the University of Würzburg, a fifty-year-old scientist who had been expelled from the Utrecht Technical School (and had never received a diploma) was investigating the electrostatic properties of various glass vacuum tubes, fitted with metal posts at each end. At the turn of the century, physicists were obsessed with electricity; their laboratory’s stature was determined by battery power and the size of their sparks, with an appearance that has been re-created on a more epic scale in the movies of
Frankenstein
. Everything in a scientist’s lab was handmade in this, the “sealing wax and string” era, as red Bank of England wax was liberally used to seal up leaking vacuum apparatuses, and delicate blown-glass tubes were held up with strings.

The Tesla coil of 1891 provided electrical investigators with their first generator of lightning-quality bolts, but the most popular turn-of-the-century sparker was the Rühmkorff—a widely admired London Rühmkorff had a 280-mile-long coil that could throw forty-two-inch jolts. These induction coils were powered by sulfuric and nitric acid batteries with zinc anodes that had to be cleaned with mercury, a combination that produced a constant gust of unsavory odors. By 1895, physicists were attaching each end of a vacuum
tube to these coils, and trying to understand why throwing the switch would make the insides glow in blues and greens, a philosophic conundrum as these were “vacuum” tubes with presumably nothing inside them (though the mechanical methods of producing vacuums at the time rarely achieved perfect zero emptiness). The more advanced of these men and women thought that the revelation of the source of these glows might reveal the mysteries of electricity . . . and they were right. English chemist William Crookes insisted that the evanescences within cathode tubes, these cathode rays, must be a new form of “radiant matter” in a “fourth state”—neither solid, liquid, nor gas. French physicist Jean Perrin theorized that they were “corpuscles” carrying a negative charge . . . eventually known as electrons.

Wilhelm Röntgen (
RUNT-gun
)—described by a
McClure’s
magazine profile as
“a tall, slender, and loose-limbed man, whose whole appearance bespeaks enthusiasm and energy”—was director of the Physical Science Institute at the University of Würzburg and lived with his wife, Anna Bertha, upstairs from his two-room office, “a laboratory which, though in all ways modest, is destined to be enduringly historical. There was a wide table shelf running along the farther side, in front of the two windows, which were high, and gave plenty of light. In the centre was a stove; on the left, a small cabinet, whose shelves held the small objects which the professor had been using. There was a table in the left-hand corner; and another small table . . . was near the stove, and a Rühmkorff coil was on the right. The lesson of the laboratory was eloquent. Compared, for instance, with the elaborate, expensive, and complete apparatus of, say, the University of London, or of any of the great American universities, it was bare and unassuming to a degree.” Today the site of this lab is easy for medical-imaging enthusiasts to find, as it’s directly behind the Würzburg bus station.

Röntgen used a Raps pump to vacuum out the pear-shaped Hittorf-Crookes and zeppelin-like Lenard tubes, which he then connected to a Rühmkorff that could throw sparks of four to six inches. On November 8, 1895, he covered a Lenard with black cardboard, drew the curtains to completely darken the room and ensure that the cardboard jacket was light-tight, and flipped the current. He then did the same with a different style of tube, a Crookes, but this time, though the cardboard still kept all light within, he noticed an odd, green glow coming from a lab bench, about a meter away. He turned the current off . . . the glow from the bench faded . . . then clicked the switch back . . . and once again the glow resumed. Lighting a match, he went over and found a piece of cardboard coated in barium platinocyanide—a standard fluorescent screen called a
Leuchtschirm
—and realized that, somehow,
invisible rays from the cathode tube had to be passing through the black cardboard sheath and igniting this distant screen:
“A yellowish-green light spread all over its surface in clouds, waves, and flashes. The yellow-green luminescence, all the stranger and stronger in the darkness, trembled, wavered, and floated over the paper, in rhythm with the snapping of the discharge. Through the metal plate, the paper, myself, and the tin box, the invisible rays were flying, with an effect strange, interesting, and uncanny.”

It was mysterious, and alarming. Wilhelm immediately began a series of investigatory experiments to learn as much as possible about these rays. He kept using thicker and thicker objects to try to block the emanations, from paper to cardboard to books, then experimented with sheets of metal. Only a disk of lead would wholly interfere; otherwise, the
Leuchtschirm
continued to luminesce. At one point he photographed his door, which produced a strange effect in the plate, and he couldn’t understand this result. He took the door apart, and the answer was plain: lead paint.

Once while he was waving a lead disk between the tube and the screen, his hand fell before the stream. On the
Leuchtschirm
, within the vague, dark outline of the shadow of his skin, the bones of his fingers could plainly be seen. He was so stunned that he decided to tell absolutely no one about this:
“When at first I made the startling discovery of the penetrating rays, it was such an extraordinary astonishing phenomenon that I had to convince myself repeatedly by doing the same experiment over and over again to make absolutely certain that the rays actually existed. . . . I was torn between doubt and hope, and did not want to have any other thoughts interfere with my experiments. . . . I was as if in a state of shock.”

For the next two months, Röntgen spent every possible moment exploring this discovery, photographing the effects of the rays passing through wood, metal, books, and flesh, spending so much time at the lab that his wife became upset. When her husband then described what he’d found, Anna Bertha thought Wilhelm had lost his mind. On December 22, 1895, he asked her to come downstairs with him and had her rest her hand atop a cassette holding a photographic plate. He showered her with rays for fifteen minutes, then asked her to wait. He returned with the developed plate: a photograph of the bones in her hands and the rings on her fingers, with her flesh in soft outline around the whole. He was so pleased with what he had discovered. She was horrified, and like so many others in that era who would, for the first time, view what will remain, she cried out,
“I have seen my death!”

Even after constant efforts in the lab, Röntgen remained so mystified by his rays that he could only name them X . . . the unknown. Almost immediately after he began to report his findings, others started working with cathode-ray screens and published follow-up reports in scientific, medical, and electrical journals, which were in turn almost immediately taken up by the popular press.
McClure’s
:
“Exactly what kind of a force Professor Röntgen has discovered he does not know. As will be seen below, he declines to call it a new kind of light, or a new form of electricity. He has given it the name of the X rays. Others speak of it as the Röntgen rays. Thus far its results only, and not its essence, are known. In the terminology of science it is generally called ‘a new mode of motion,’ or, in other words, a new force. As to whether it is or not actually a force new to science, or one of the known forces masquerading under strange conditions, weighty authorities are already arguing. More than one eminent scientist has already affected to see in it a key to the great mystery of the law of gravity. All who have expressed themselves in print have admitted, with more or less frankness, that, in view of Röntgen’s discovery, science must forth-with revise, possibly to a revolutionary degree, the long accepted theories concerning the phenomena of light and sound.”

“Röntgen ray” articles appeared on January 5 in Vienna’s
Wiener Press
; January 7, in Frankfurt’s
Frankfurter
and Berlin’s
Vossiche
; January 11, London’s
Saturday Review
; January 13, Paris’s
Le Matin
; January 16,
New York Times
. In a journalist’s game of “telephone,” each would rewrite the previous item with an ever-growing collapse in accuracy, which continually enraged Röntgen. As the public then became obsessed with the discovery, the era’s newspapers fed the hunger by publishing thousands of haunting photographs illuminating the shadowy flesh and lacy, geometric skeletons of mice, chickens, puppies, and birds. Journalist Cleveland Moffett described one example of what were called
shadow photographs
:
“A more remarkable picture is one taken in the same way, but with a somewhat longer exposure—of a rabbit laid upon the ebonite plate, and so successfully pierced with the Röntgen rays that not only the bones of the body show plainly, but also the six grains of shot with which the animal was killed. The bones of the fore legs show with beautiful distinctness inside the shadowy flesh, while a closer inspection makes visible the ribs, the cartilages of the ear, and a lighter region in the centre of the body, which marks the location of the heart.” Inside of a year, over fifty X-ray books and a thousand articles were released, and at London’s Crystal Palace, lucky visitors could have their change purses Röntgen-rayed as a souvenir. The fad was versified in
Photography
magazine: