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.
And since these numbers filled his mind, intruding on all the affairs of
his life with the vision of a new world, perhaps the chapters of this
book may be allowed to follow the Moseley order. The names of the
elements will usually be irrelevant to the chapters, but not to the
subject on which Marvin brooded, and not to the deeper nature of the
world we live in.