The birth of the Cavendish Laboratory
By the mid 19th century, the University of Cambridge had fallen behind in the physical sciences, leading to a long campaign to establish a laboratory for experimental physics. Malcolm Longair explores how the Cavendish Laboratory came to be.
Image above: The entrance to the Cavendish Laboratory on Free School Lane.
The opening of the Cavendish Laboratory in 1874 was the result of a long campaign to make experimental physics an integral part of research and teaching at Cambridge University. From the beginning of the 19th century, the emerging sciences of electricity, magnetism, heat and thermodynamics were added to the edifice of Newtonian physics and found practical application in the burgeoning industrial revolution.
Experimental physics in Britain was largely carried out in private laboratories or workshops but was not part of university curricula. In Cambridge, natural philosophy was at a rather low ebb. As Edmund Whittaker wrote:
In 1841, Albert, the Prince Consort, took on the role of promoting industry and science in Britain. His most spectacular achievement was undoubtedly the Great Exhibition of 1851, intended to demonstrate that the country was an industrial leader on the global stage.
Image above: Queen Victoria and Prince Albert visit the machinery department of the Great Exhibition of 1851. (Courtesy of the Special Collections Department, Library, University of Glasgow)
Well before this time, however, Albert had been convinced of the need for the reform of Cambridge University. He became Chancellor of Cambridge University and proposed a number of reforms in 1848. The general consensus was that the University had fallen behind in the fields of the physical sciences. The proposals were generally welcomed but faced opposition from more conservative elements, which can be gauged from the response of William Whewell, Master of Trinity College:
But the Prince had allies. The prime minister Lord John Russell appointed a Royal Commission in 1848 to investigate ‘the State, Discipline, Studies and Revenues of the University of Cambridge’. The Commission’s report confirmed the Prince’s recommendations, remarking that
Despite Whewell and the conservatives’ opposition, the Commission stuck to its guns, recommending that there should be a ‘complete and thoroughly equipped laboratory for chemistry ...’ Were the recommendations accepted, there did not appear to be any reason ‘why Cambridge should not become as great a School of physical and experimental as it is already of mathematical and classical instruction.’ An immediate result was the establishment of the Natural Sciences Tripos in 1851, including chemistry, mineralogy, geology, comparative anatomy, physiology and botany, but physics was not included. It was only treated as a distinct discipline in 1861.
The importance of physics for industry was brought home by the involvement of William Thomson, the future Lord Kelvin, in laying the first successful transatlantic cable. The first attempt by the Atlantic Telegraph Company, costing £350,000, had proved to be a disaster – the cable deteriorated rapidly and was unusable in a matter of weeks. Thomson had already made a study of such cables using electromagnetic theory, but his results were rejected by the empirical electricians. A further £1 million was raised and, following Thomson’s recommendations, a cable was successfully laid in 1866. Thomson was knighted in the same year, an unusual distinction for a university professor. The University of Glasgow provided him with a suite of six experimental laboratories in their new buildings.
The untimely death of the Prince Consort in 1861 threatened to delay the Royal Commission’s reforms. He was succeeded as Chancellor by William Cavendish, who became the seventh Duke of Devonshire in 1858. Cavendish, a distant relative of the famous natural philosopher Henry Cavendish, was a first-rate scientist. He excelled in the Mathematical Tripos and was the first Smith’s Prizeman in 1829. He was also a major investor in the steel industry, applying scientific methods to improve industrial steelmaking. The discovery of rich deposits of high-grade haematite ore on his estates in north Lancashire resulted in a vast expansion of steelmaking capacity. By his death in 1891, he had amassed a fortune of £1,790,870.
Britain was seriously lagging behind continental Europe in training in the physical sciences and engineering. Experimental physics was still not part of the Natural Sciences Tripos and so a further syndicate was appointed in 1868 to address the issue. It recommended setting up a professorship of experimental physics, as well as the construction of a specially designed laboratory.
The professor would be supported by a demonstrator to give personal instruction to the students and a museum and lecture room attendant to service the laboratories, the instruments and apparatus. The cost of the building was estimated to be £5,000 and the instruments £1,300, while the annual cost of employing the professor, the demonstrator and the lecture attendant was £660.
The colleges, however, were not prepared to make the funds available. The deadlock was broken when Cavendish wrote to the Vice-Chancellor on the 10th October 1870,
Image: William Cavendish (1808-1891), 7th Duke of Devonshire, Chancellor of Cambridge University (1861-1891). Oil painting after George Frederic Watts by Katherine Maude Humphrey.
The untimely death of the Prince Consort in 1861 threatened to delay the Royal Commission’s reforms. He was succeeded as Chancellor by William Cavendish, who became the seventh Duke of Devonshire in 1858. Cavendish, a distant relative of the famous natural philosopher Henry Cavendish, was a first-rate scientist. He excelled in the Mathematical Tripos and was the first Smith’s Prizeman in 1829. He was also a major investor in the steel industry, applying scientific methods to improve industrial steelmaking. The discovery of rich deposits of high-grade haematite ore on his estates in north Lancashire resulted in a vast expansion of steelmaking capacity. By his death in 1891, he had amassed a fortune of £1,790,870.
Britain was seriously lagging behind continental Europe in training in the physical sciences and engineering. Experimental physics was still not part of the Natural Sciences Tripos and so a further syndicate was appointed in 1868 to address the issue. It recommended setting up a professorship of experimental physics, as well as the construction of a specially designed laboratory.
The professor would be supported by a demonstrator to give personal instruction to the students and a museum and lecture room attendant to service the laboratories, the instruments and apparatus. The cost of the building was estimated to be £5,000 and the instruments £1,300, while the annual cost of employing the professor, the demonstrator and the lecture attendant was £660.
The colleges, however, were not prepared to make the funds available. The deadlock was broken when Cavendish wrote to the Vice-Chancellor on the 10th October 1870,
Image: William Cavendish (1808-1891), 7th Duke of Devonshire, Chancellor of Cambridge University (1861-1891). Oil painting after George Frederic Watts by Katherine Maude Humphrey (Copyright Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge).
On 9 February 1871, the Council of the Senate agreed to accept the Chancellor’s gift and to fund the posts needed to staff the laboratory. Finally in 1873, experimental physics incorporated into the Natural Sciences Tripos.
The electors to the Cavendish Professorship sought the best possible candidate for the new chair. An obvious choice was William Thomson, the most distinguished British physicist of his day, but with his well-furnished new laboratory in Glasgow and his industrial and domestic arrangements in the area, he was unwilling to accept the offer.
The electors turned to James Clerk Maxwell. His health had always been somewhat fragile and he had resigned his chair at King’s College, London in 1865, returning to manage his family estate at Glenlair in Scotland, where he set about writing his monumental Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873). In 1871, John William Strutt, who was to become the third Lord Rayleigh, wrote to Maxwell from Cambridge:
Maxwell was ideally matched to the requirements of the professorship. As soon as his appointment was approved in 1871, he set about designing a state-of-the-art laboratory, visiting Thomson’s lab in Glasgow and the Clarendon Laboratory in Oxford for inspiration.
The site on Free School Lane was selected, which was sufficiently far from the main thoroughfares to minimise traffic vibrations. Plans drawn up by the architect William Fawcett were scrutinised by Maxwell, who altered the locations of walls and the disposition of the rooms according to his perceived needs. The cost of the building increased to £8,450, but Cavendish agreed to cover the shortfall.
James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879). Oil painting by Jemima Blackburn, née Wedderburn.
Maxwell was ideally matched to the requirements of the professorship. As soon as his appointment was approved in 1871, he set about designing a state-of-the-art laboratory, visiting Thomson’s lab in Glasgow and the Clarendon Laboratory in Oxford for inspiration.
The site on Free School Lane was selected, which was sufficiently far from the main thoroughfares to minimise traffic vibrations. Plans drawn up by the architect William Fawcett were scrutinised by Maxwell, who altered the locations of walls and the disposition of the rooms according to his perceived needs. The cost of the building increased to £8,450, but Cavendish agreed to cover the shortfall.
Image: James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879). Oil painting by Jemima Blackburn, née Wedderburn .
The formal opening of the splendid three-floor building took place on 16 June 1874. On the ground floor, the highest stability was needed in the magnetism room.
Above: Fawcett’s plan for the ground floor of Cavendish Laboratory with Maxwell’s indicated in his own hand in red pencil.
On the first floor, a large room for use by students contained ten tables, each containing a standpipe to which four Bunsen burners could be attached. The professor’s private room had two hatches opening onto the students’ laboratory, so that he could keep an eye on what they were doing. The lecture room had steeply raking seats for up to 180 students who could clearly observe the experiments being carried out on the long oak bench. Water was laid on in all the rooms. The height of the building allowed the construction of a Bunsen water pump with ‘a vertical fall of considerably more than 50 ft ... used to exhaust a large receiver, from which pipes will communicate with the different rooms’.
Maxwell acquired an extensive suite of instruments funded by Cavendish’s gift, as well as instruments he brought with him. Research activities got off to an encouraging start. Maxwell wrote to his uncle Robert Cay on 12 May 1874,
Ten physics laboratories were founded in the period 1866 to 1874 in ‘British Institutes of higher learning’ but most of the new laboratory directors struggled to maintain their research output in the face of heavy teaching loads and underfunding. Maxwell, however, took full advantage of the collegiate structure at Cambridge. The normal route for students joining the Cavendish was to complete their studies in mathematics and then proceed to experimental research under Maxwell’s direction. They therefore had the mathematical skills to appreciate the most advanced problems in theoretical and experimental physics. Because of their success in the Mathematical Tripos, they would often win college fellowships or posts which enabled them to carry out substantial long-term research investigations.
The general view from outside was that Cambridge was too conservative to make a success of experimental physics. As Norman Lockyer, the influential founding editor of Nature remarked in 1874,
Lockyer had reckoned without the almost unique qualities of Maxwell, who set forth his agenda in his inaugural lecture in October 1871,
Maxwell immediately rejected this view,
Within ten years the laboratory was operating at the frontiers of experimental physics. Sadly, Maxwell died in 1879, but he had laid the foundations for what would prove to be 150 years of scientific discovery.
Malcolm Longair is the Emeritus Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy, former Head of the Cavendish Laboratory (1997 – 2005), and former Director of Development until his retirement in 2023.
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