Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (18 page)

George Luks and George Bellows, an anarchist, were harsher, less sentimental.
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Luks painted New York crowds, the teeming congestion in its streets and neighbourhoods. Both he and Bellows frequently represented the boxing and wrestling matches that were such a feature of working-class life and so typical of the raw, naked struggle among the immigrant communities. Here was life on the edge in every way. Although prize fighting was illegal in New York in the 1900s, it nonetheless continued. Bellows’s painting
Both Members of This Club,
originally entitled
A Nigger and a White Man,
reflected the concern that many had at the time about the rise of the blacks within sports: ‘If the Negro could beat the white, what did that say about the Master Race?’
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Bellows, probably the most talented painter of the school, also followed the building of Penn Station, the construction of which, by McKim, Mead and White, meant boring a tunnel halfway under Manhattan and the demolition of four entire city blocks between Thirty-first and Thirty-third Streets. For years there was a huge crater in the centre of New York, occupied by steam shovels and other industrial appliances, flames and smoke and hundreds of workmen. Bellows transformed these grimy details into things of beauty.
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The achievement of the Ashcan School was to pinpoint and report the raw side of New York immigrant life. Although at times these artists fixed on fleeting beauty with a generally uncritical eye, their main aim was to show people at the bottom of the heap, not so much suffering, but making the most of what they had. Henri also taught a number of painters who would, in time, become leading American abstractionists.
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At the end of 1903, in the same week that the Wright brothers made their first flight, and just two blocks from the Flatiron Building, the first celluloid print of
The Great Train Robbery
was readied in the offices of Edison Kinetograph,
on Twenty-third Street. Thomas Edison was one of a handful of people in the United States, France, Germany, and Britain who had developed silent movies in the mid-1890s.

Between then and 1903 there had been hundreds of staged fictional films, though none had been as long as
The Great Train Robbery,
which lasted for all of six minutes. There had been chase movies before, too, many produced in Britain right at the end of the nineteenth century. But they used one camera to tell a simple story simply.
The Great Train Robbery,
directed and edited by
Edwin Porter,
was much more sophisticated and ambitious than anything that had gone before. The main reason for this was the way Porter told the story. Since its inception in France in 1895, when the Lumière brothers had given the first public demonstration of moving pictures, film had explored many different locations, to set itself apart from theatre. Cameras had been mounted on trains, outside the windows of ordinary homes, looking in, even underwater. But in
The Great Train Robbery,
in itself an ordinary robbery followed by a chase, Porter in fact told
two
stories, which he intercut. That’s what made it so special. The telegraph operator is attacked and tied up, the robbery takes place, and the bandits escape. At intervals, however, the operator is shown struggling free and summoning law enforcement. Later in the film the two narratives come together as the posse chase after the bandits.
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We take such ‘parallel editing’ – intercutting between related narratives – for granted now. At the time, however, people were fascinated as to whether film could throw light on the stream of consciousness, Bergson’s notions of time, or Husserl’s phenomenology. More practical souls were exercised because parallel editing added immeasurably to the psychological tension in the film, and it couldn’t be done in the theatre.
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In late 1903 the film played in every cinema in New York, all ten of them. It was also responsible for Adolph Zukor and Marcus Loew leaving their fur business and buying small theatres exclusively dedicated to showing movies. Because they generally charged a nickel for entry, they became known as ‘nickelodeons.’ Both William Fox and Sam Warner were fascinated enough by Porter’s
Robbery
to buy their own movie theatres, though before long they each moved into production, creating the studios that bore their names.
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Porter’s success was built on by another man who instinctively grasped that the inrimate nature of film, as compared with the theatre, would change the relationship between audience and actor. It was this insight that gave rise to the idea of the movie star.
David Wark (D. W.) Griffith
was a lean man with grey eyes and a hooked nose. He appeared taller than he was on account of the high-laced hook shoes he wore, which had loops above their heels for pulling them on – his trouser bottoms invariably rode up on the loops. His collar was too big, his string tie too loose, and he liked to wear a large hat when large hats were no longer the fashion. He looked a mess, but according to many, he ‘was touched by genius.’ He was the son of a Confederate Kentucky colonel, ‘Roaring Jake’ Griffith, the only man in the army who, so it was said, could shout to a soldier five miles away.
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Griffith had begun life as an actor but transferred to movies by selling story synopses (these were silent movies, so no scripts were necessary). When he was thirty-two he joined an early film outfit,
the Biograph Company in Manhattan, and had been there about a year when
Mary Pickford
walked in. Born in Toronto in 1893, she was sixteen. Originally christened Gladys Smith, she was a precocious if delicate child. After her father was killed in a paddle-steamer accident, her mother, in reduced circumstances, had been forced to let the master bedroom of their home to a theatrical couple; the husband was a stage manager at a local theatre. This turned into Gladys’s opportunity, for he persuaded Charlotte Smith to let her two daughters appear as extras. Gladys soon found she had talent and liked the life. By the time she was seven, she had moved to New York where, at $15 a week, the pay was better. She was now the major breadwinner of the family.
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In an age when the movies were as young as she, theatre life in New York was much more widespread. In 1901–2, for example, there were no fewer than 314 plays running on or off Broadway, and it was not hard for someone with Gladys’s talent to find work. By the time she was twelve, her earnings were $40 a week. When she was fourteen she went on tour with a comedy,
The Warrens of Virginia
, and while she was in Chicago she saw her first film. She immediately grasped the possibilities of the new medium, and using her recently created and less harsh stage name Mary Pickford, she applied to several studios. Her first efforts failed, but her mother pushed her into applying for work at the Biograph. At first Griffith thought Mary Pickford was ‘too little and too fat’ for the movies. But he was impressed by her looks and her curls and asked her out for dinner; she refused.
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It was only when he asked her to walk across the studio and chat with actors she hadn’t met that he decided she might have screen appeal. In those days, movies were short and inexpensive to make. There was no such thing as a makeup assistant, and actors wore their own clothes (though by 1909 there had been some experimentation with lighting techniques). A director might make two or three pictures a week, usually on location in New York. In 1909, for example, Griffith made 142 pictures.
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After an initial reluctance, Griffith gave Pickford the lead in
The Violin-Maker of Cremona
in 1909.
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A buzz went round the studio, and when it was first screened in the Biograph projection room, the entire studio turned up to watch. Pickford went on to play the lead in twenty-six more films before the year was out.

But Mary Pickford’s name was not yet known. Her first review in the
New York Dramatic Mirror
of 21 August 1909 read, ‘This delicious little comedy introduced again an ingenue whose work in Biograph pictures is attracting attention.’ Mary Pickford was not named because all the actors in Griffith’s movies were, to begin with, anonymous. But Griffith was aware, as this review suggests, that Pickford was attracting a following, and he raised her wages quietly from $40 to $100 a week, an unheard-of figure for a repertory actor at that time.
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She was still only sixteen.

Three of the great innovations in filmmaking occurred in Griffith’s studio. The first change came in the way movies were staged. Griffith began to direct actors to come on camera, not from right or left as they did in the theatre, but from
behind
the camera and exit toward it. They could therefore be seen in long range, medium range, and even close-up in the same shot. The close-up
was vital in shifting the emphasis in movies to the looks of the actor as much as his or her talent. The second revolution occurred when Griffith hired another director. This allowed him to break out of two-day films and plan bigger projects, telling more complex stories. The third revolution built on the first and was arguably the most important.
⁷⁶
Florence Lawrence, who was marketed as the ‘Biograph Girl’ before Mary, left for another company. Her contract with the new studio contained an unprecedented clause: anonymity was out; instead she would be billed under her own name, as the ‘star’ of her pictures. Details about this innovation quickly leaked all over the fledgling movie industry, with the result that it was not Lawrence who took the best advantage of the change she had wrought. Griffith was forced to accept a similar contract with Mary Pickford, and as 1909 gave way to 1910, she prepared to become the world’s first movie star.
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A vast country, teeming with immigrants who did not share a common heritage, America was a natural home for the airplane and the mass-market movie, every bit as much as the skyscraper. The Ashcan school recorded the poverty that most immigrants endured when they arrived in the country, but it also epitomised the optimism with which most of the emigrés regarded their new home. The huge oceans on either side of the Americas helped guarantee that the United States was isolated from many of the irrational and hateful dogmas and idealisms of Europe which these immigrants were escaping. Instead of the grand, all-embracing ideas of Freud, Hofmannsthal, or Brentano, the mystical notions of Kandinsky, or the vague theories of Bergson, Americans preferred more practical, more limited ideas that worked, relishing the difference and isolation from Europe. That pragmatic isolation would never go away entirely. It was, in some ways, America’s most precious asset.

Pragmatism was an American philosophy, but it was grounded in empiricism, a much older notion, spawned in Europe. Although figures such as Nietzsche, Bergson, and Husserl became famous in the early years of the century, with their wide-ranging monistic and dogmatic theories of explanation (as William James would have put it), there were many scientists who simply ignored what they had to say and went their own way. It is a mark of the division of thought throughout the century that even as philosophers tried to adapt to science, science ploughed on, hardly looking over its shoulder, scarcely bothered by what the philosophers had to offer, indifferent alike to criticism and praise. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the last half of the first decade, when the difficult groundwork was completed in several hard sciences. (‘Hard’ here has two senses: first, intellectually difficult; second, concerning hard matters, the material basis of phenomena.) In stark contrast to Nietzsche and the like, these men concentrated their experimentation, and resulting theories, on very restricted aspects of the observable universe. That did not prevent their results having a much wider relevance, once they were accepted, which they soon were.

The best example of this more restricted approach took place in Manchester, England, on the evening of 7 March 1911. We know about the event thanks to James Chadwick, who was a student then but later became a famous physicist. A meeting was held at the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, where the audience was made up mainly of municipal worthies – intelligent people but scarcely specialists. These evenings usually consisted of two or three talks on diverse subjects, and that of 7 March was no exception. A local fruit importer spoke first, giving an account of how he had been surprised to discover a rare snake mixed in with a load of Jamaican bananas. The next talk was delivered by Ernest Rutherford, professor of physics at Manchester University, who introduced those present to what is certainly one of the most influential ideas of the entire century – the basic structure of the atom. How many of the group understood Rutherford is hard to say. He told his audience that the atom was made up of ‘a central electrical charge concentrated at a point and surrounded by a uniform spherical distribution of opposite electricity equal in amount.’ It sounds dry, but to Rutherford’s colleagues and students present, it
was the most exciting news they had ever heard. James Chadwick later said that he remembered the meeting all his life. It was, he wrote, ‘a most shattering performance to us, young boys that we were…. We realised that this was obviously the truth, this was it.
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Such confidence in Rutherford’s revolutionary ideas had not always been so evident. In the late 1890s Rutherford had developed the ideas of the French physicist Henri Becquerel. In turn, Becquerel had built on Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen’s discovery of X rays, which we encountered in chapter three. Intrigued by these mysterious rays that were given off from fluorescing glass, Becquerel, who, like his father and grandfather, was professor of physics at the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, decided to investigate other substances that ‘fluoresced.’ Becquerel’s classic experiment occurred by accident, when he sprinkled some uranyl potassium sulphate on a sheet of photographic paper and left it locked in a drawer for a few days. When he looked, he found the image of the salt on the paper. There had been no naturally occurring light to activate the paper, so the change must have been wrought by the uranium salt. Becquerel had discovered naturally occurring radioactivity.
²

It was this result that attracted the attention of Ernest Rutherford. Raised in New Zealand, Rutherford was a stocky character with a weatherbeaten face who loved to bellow the words to hymns whenever he got the chance, a cigarette hanging from his lips. ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ was a particular favourite. After he arrived in Cambridge in October 1895, he quickly began work on a series of experiments designed to elaborate Becquerel’s results.
³
There were three naturally radioactive substances – uranium, radium, and thorium – and Rutherford and his assistant Frederick Soddy pinned their attentions on thorium, which gave off a radioactive gas. When they analysed the gas, however, Rutherford and Soddy were shocked to discover that it was completely inert – in other words, it wasn’t thorium. How could that be? Soddy later described the excitement of those times in a memoir. He and Rutherford gradually realised that their results ‘conveyed the tremendous and inevitable conclusion that the element thorium was spontaneously transmuting itself into [the chemically inert] argon gas!’ This was the first of Rutherford’s many important experiments: what he and Soddy had discovered was the spontaneous decomposition of the radioactive elements, a modern form of alchemy. The implications were momentous.
⁴

This wasn’t all. Rutherford also observed that when uranium or thorium decayed, they gave off two types of radiation. The weaker of the two he called ‘alpha’ radiation, later experiments showing that ‘alpha particles’ were in fact helium atoms and therefore positively charged. The stronger ‘beta radiation’, on the other hand, consisted of electrons with a negative charge. The electrons, Rutherford said, were ‘similar in all respects to cathode rays.’ So exciting were these results that in 1908 Rutherford was awarded the Nobel Prize at age thirty seven, by which time he had moved from Cambridge, first to Canada and then back to Britain, to Manchester, as professor of physics.
⁵
By now he was devoting all his energies to the alpha particle. He reasoned that because it was so much larger than the beta electron (the electron had almost no mass), it was far more
likely to interact with matter, and that interaction would obviously be crucial to further understanding. If only he could think up the right experiments, the alpha might even tell him something about the structure of the atom. ‘I was brought up to look at the atom as a nice hard fellow, red or grey in colour, according to taste,’ he said.
⁶
That view had begun to change while he was in Canada, where he had shown that alpha particles sprayed through a narrow slit and projected in a beam could be deflected by a magnetic field. All these experiments were carried out with very basic equipment – that was the beauty of Rutherford’s approach. But it was a refinement of this equipment that produced the next major breakthrough. In one of the many experiments he tried, he covered the slit with a very thin sheet of mica, a mineral that splits fairly naturally into slivers. The piece Rutherford placed over the slit in his experiment was so thin – about three-thousandths of an inch – that in theory at least alpha particles should have passed through it. They did, but not in quite the way Rutherford had expected. When the results of the spraying were ‘collected’ on photographic paper, the edges of the image appeared fuzzy. Rutherford could think of only one explanation for that: some of the particles were being deflected. That much was clear, but it was the
size
of the deflection that excited Rutherford. From his experiments with magnetic fields, he knew that powerful forces were needed to induce even small deflections. Yet his photographic paper showed that some alpha particles were being knocked off course by as much as two degrees. Only one thing could explain that. As Rutherford himself was to put it, ‘the atoms of matter must be the seat of very intense electrical forces.’
⁷

Science is not always quite the straight line it likes to think it is, and this result of Rutherford’s, though surprising, did not automatically lead to further insights. Instead, for a time Rutherford and his new assistant, Ernest Marsden, went doggedly on, studying the behaviour of alpha particles, spraying them on to foils of different material – gold, silver, or aluminium.
⁸
Nothing notable was observed. But then Rutherford had an idea. He arrived at the laboratory one morning and ‘wondered aloud’ to Marsden whether (with the deflection result still in his mind) it might be an idea to bombard the metal foils with particles sprayed
at an angle.
The most obvious angle to start with was 45 degrees, which is what Marsden did, using foil made of gold. This simple experiment ‘shook physics to its foundations.’ It was ‘a new view of nature … the discovery of a new layer of reality, a new dimension of the universe.’
⁹
Sprayed at an angle of 45 degrees, the alpha particles did not pass
through
the gold foil – instead they were bounced back by 90 degrees onto the zinc sulphide screen. ‘I remember well reporting the result to Rutherford,’ Marsden wrote in a memoir, ‘when I met him on the steps leading to his private room, and the joy with which I told him.’
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Rutherford was quick to grasp what Marsden had already worked out: for such a deflection to occur, a massive amount of energy must be locked up somewhere in the equipment used in their simple experiment.

But for a while Rutherford remained mystified. ‘It was quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life,’ he wrote in his autobiography. ‘It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a
piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you. On consideration I realised that this scattering backwards must be the result of a single collision, and when I made calculations I saw that it was impossible to get anything of that order of magnitude unless you took a system in which the greatest part of the mass of the atom was concentrated in a minute nucleus.’
¹¹
In fact, he brooded for months before feeling confident he was right. One reason was because he was slowly coming to terms with the fact that the idea of the atom he had grown up with – J. J. Thomson’s notion that it was a miniature plum pudding, with electrons dotted about like raisins – would no longer do.
¹²
Gradually he became convinced that another model entirely was far more likely. He made an analogy with the heavens: the nucleus of the atom was orbited by electrons just as planets went round the stars.

As a theory, the planetary model was elegant, much more so than the ‘plum pudding’ version. But was it correct? To test his theory, Rutherford suspended a large magnet from the ceiling of his laboratory. Directly underneath, on a table, he fixed another magnet. When the pendulum magnet was swung over the table at a 45-degree angle and when the magnets were matched in polarity, the swinging magnet bounced through 90 degrees just as the alpha particles did when they hit the gold foil. His theory had passed the first test, and atomic physics had now become nuclear physics.
¹³

For many people, particle physics has been the greatest intellectual adventure of the century. But in some respects there have been two sides to it. One side is exemplified by Rutherford, who was brilliantly adept at thinking up often very simple experiments to prove or disprove the latest advance in theory. The other project has been
theoretical
physics, which involved the imaginative use of already existing information to be reorganised so as to advance knowledge. Of course, experimental physics and theoretical physics are intimately related; sooner or later, theories have to be tested. Nonetheless, within the discipline of physics overall, theoretical physics is recognised as an activity in its own right, and for many perfectly respectable physicists theoretical work is all they do. Often the experimental verification of theories in physics cannot be tested for years, because the technology to do so doesn’t exist.

The most famous theoretical physicist in history, indeed one of the most famous figures of the century, was developing his theories at more or less the same time that Rutherford was conducting his experiments. Albert Einstein arrived on the intellectual stage with a bang. Of all the scientific journals in the world, the single most sought-after collector’s item by far is the
Annalen der Physik,
volume XVII, for 1905, for in that year Einstein published not one but three papers in the journal, causing 1905 to be dubbed the annus mirabilis of science. These three papers were: the first experimental verification of Max Planck’s quantum theory; Einstein’s examination of Brownian motion, which proved the existence of molecules; and the special theory of relativity with its famous equation, E=mc
²
.

Einstein was born in Ulm, between Stuttgart and Munich, on 14 March 1879, in the valley of the Danube near the slopes that lead to the Swabian
Alps. Hermann, his father, was an electrical engineer. Though the birth was straightforward, Einstein’s mother Pauline received a shock when she first saw her son: his head was large and so oddly shaped, she was convinced he was deformed.
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In fact there was nothing wrong with the infant, though he did have an unusually large head. According to family legend, Einstein was not especially happy at elementary school, nor was he particularly clever.
¹⁵
He later said that he was slow in learning to talk because he was ‘waiting’ until he could deliver fully formed sentences. In fact, the family legend was exaggerated. Research into Einstein’s early life shows that at school he always came top, or next to top, in both mathematics and Latin. But he did find enjoyment in his own company and developed a particular fascination with his building blocks. When he was five, his father gave him a compass. This so excited him, he said, that he ‘trembled and grew cold.’
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Though Einstein was not an only child, he was fairly solitary by nature and independent, a trait that was encouraged by his parents’ habit of encouraging self-reliance in their children at a very early age. Albert, for instance, was only three or four when he was given the responsibility of running errands, alone in the busy streets of Munich.
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The Einsteins encouraged their children to develop their own reading, and while studying math at school, Albert was discovering Kant and Darwin for himself at home – very advanced for a child.
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This did, however, help transform him from being a quiet child into a much more ‘difficult’ and rebellious adolescent. His character was only part of the problem here. He hated the autocratic approach used in his school, as he hated the autocratic side of Germany in general. This showed itself politically, in Germany as in Vienna, in a crude nationalism and a vicious anti-Semitism. Uncomfortable in such a psychological climate, Einstein argued incessantly with his fellow pupils and teachers, to the point where he was expelled, though he was thinking of leaving anyway. Aged sixteen he moved with his parents to Milan, attended university in Zurich at nineteen, though later he found a job as a patent officer in Bern. And so, half educated and half-in and half-out of academic life, he began in 1901 to publish scientific papers. His first, on the nature of liquid surfaces, was, in the words of one expert, ‘just plain wrong.’ More papers followed in 1903 and 1904. They were interesting but still lacked something – Einstein did not, after all, have access to the latest scientific literature and either repeated or misunderstood other people’s work. However, one of his specialities was statistical techniques, which stood him in good stead later on. More important, the fact that he was out of the mainstream of science may have helped his originality, which flourished unexpectedly in 1905. One says unexpectedly, so far as Einstein was concerned, but in fact, at the end of the nineteenth century many other mathematicians and physicists – Ludwig Boltzmann, Ernst Mach, and Jules-Henri Poincaré among them – were inclining towards something similar. Relativity, when it came, both was and was not a total surprise.
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