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| A Trip Down Free School Lane |
| Tuesday, 04 October 2005 | |
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Emily Tweed and Victoria Leung investigate the history of the Cavendish Laboratory Imagine a university that taught science degrees but did not have any laboratories. Imagine studying for a degree in science that did not involve any practical work whatsoever. Welcome to Cambridge in the midnineteenth century.
During the nineteenth century, however, institutional laboratories of the kind modern students and scientists might recognise did become increasingly common: first in Germany and France and then later in Britain and the United States. Accompanying this trend was a growing emphasis on precision measurement, partly driven by recognition of its role in industrial progress. Physicists in Britain made the link between Germany’s excellency in physics and its newfound industrial prosperity, using this to argue for better facilities and increased funding. In the 1860s the University Senate recognised the growing clamour for new laboratories in Britain by setting up a committee to investigate the possibility of establishing one in Cambridge.This investigation came out firmly in favour of creating a space for practical teaching and experimentation, fitted out with the latest apparatus and supervised by a new professor and his demonstrators. Several years later, the Cavendish Laboratory on Free School Lane opened amidst a great deal of interest… and not a little controversy. The Cavendish Laboratory was named after the University Chancellor who had provided most of the funding, the University itself being in a spot of financial bother at the time. James Clerk Maxwell, now renowned for his work on electricity and magnetism, was appointed the first Cavendish Professor and helped oversee the design and construction of the new laboratory. It was modelled on the pioneering teaching laboratories of the German universities, which emphasised the importance of systematic practical training and the use of elaborate instruments. As well as space for research it also contained lecture halls and a workshop for the construction and repair of equipment. Strange as it may sound to us now, concerns over whether or not practical work was an appropriate part of a scientific education plagued the Cavendish’s early years. It was a time when the manipulation of instruments carried undesirable associations with factory work and manual labour, occupations considered entirely unsuitable for a student of the University of Cambridge. Experimentation was considered by many to be an intellectual step-down from the more cerebral activities of calculating and theorizing. As Maxwell worried,“ If we succeed too well, and corrupt the minds of youth till they observe vibrations and deflections and become Senior Ops. instead of Wranglers,we may bring the whole University and all the parents about our ears.” (A ‘Wrangler’was someone who achieved a First in the Mathematical Tripos, whilst ‘Senior Ops.’ refers to someone who achieved a Second.) All in all, the bill for the original Cavendish came to £8,450. An extravagant sum at the time, this amount represents but a fraction of what laboratories cost to build and equip now. In part, this reflects changes in the technology of physics research since the nineteenth century: then, an item of apparatus usually fitted on the workbench and was often pieced together from relatively basic and easily available materials. The twentieth century saw an incredible leap in the scale of experimental physics, both in cost and size. For example, the forthcoming extension of the Cavendish is likely to cost more than £137 million, while some modern physics instruments (such is the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva) are so expensive that they require financial support from several nations. Research in the new laboratory was initially carried out by college fellows, mainly new graduates of the Mathematical Tripos which dominated Cambridge teaching in this era. It was several years before undergraduates came to use the new facility, and several more before organised lab training and practical exams were incorporated into undergraduate degree courses. The latter was brought about by the second Cavendish Professor, Lord Rayleigh, who introduced the now familiar system where students move between a series of experiments, writing reports and aided by demonstrators. In examinations, students might be asked to measure the resistance of a length of wire or the focal length of a lens, or otherwise identify a piece of apparatus and take a measurement with it. One answer from this era has become infamous: one hapless student described in 100 Years and More of Cambridge Physics"recognised in a thermometer a machine for determining the specific gravity of water”! Despite the odd undergraduate slip-up, the Cavendish soon gathered renown — particularly for the quality of its research. The lab became particularly famous for the technical expertise of its workers: ironic considering the initial objections made to its foundation. This experimental focus contrasted with the Cavendish’s counterparts on the Continent, which excelled at theoretical physics, and would serve as the foundation for the illustrious years ahead. Notoriously cramped and overcrowded, the Cavendish was extended through the 1880s and 1890s as the community of researchers grew. Its prestige attracted researchers from other universities and later from abroad, including the young Ernest Rutherford, famous for his research into atomic structure. It remained at the forefront of experimental physics throughout the twentieth century and the Cavendish can count no fewer than 28 Nobel Prize recipients among its researchers past and present. The laboratory was founded during a critical period in the history of physics. It was a time when science as a profession was gaining increasing recognition: the term ‘scientist’ was beginning to be widely used, and the people it described were growing in number. Both the modern university and modern physics as we know them were taking shape. Cambridge was offering a greater range of courses, including the Natural Sciences Tripos and research degrees, and its facilities were expanding accordingly. Physicists began to undertake systematic practical training and form organized groups of researchers, reporting their findings in specialist journals and at institutional seminars. The new Cavendish Laboratory offered students a chance to move beyond purely theoretical study for the first time, giving them the skills to pursue a career in research — an option which, only a couple of decades before, would have been open to very few. Looking at the sprawling complex in West Cambridge that the Cavendish now occupies, it seems a million miles away from the tiny laboratory on Free School Lane that cost only a few thousand pounds and which was almost not built for fear that practical work would “corrupt the minds of youth”. Emily Tweed is a third year Natural Scientist specializing in Pathology; Victoria Leung is a third year Natural Scientist specializing in Physics
1846 William Thompson, a Cambridge graduate, sets up Britain's first university physics laboratory in Glasgow. 1869 1871 1873 1874 1877 1879 1882 1884 1895 Further Reading |
Unlike today, research was not considered part and parcel of being a university professor, and practical training was not a standard part of the curriculum. Some favoured students were permitted to assist a professor in experiments but most graduated with no hands-on experience at all. The theories they were taught in lectures had mostly been elucidated by gentlemen amateurs like James Joule, who had a laboratory at home, or by academic men of science like Isaac Newton, who experimented in his college rooms. Private laboratories, rather than ones connected to institutions like universities, were the norm. Those labs that did exist in universities were small offshoots of lecture theatres where demonstrations were prepared, rather than spaces for research or teaching. News Archives
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