Description:
The Guthrie Medal and Prize of the (U.K.) Physical Society and the Institute of Physics, bronze, officially inscribed on bottom of rim, "1967. JAMES CHADWICK", in case of issue.
Obverse inscription: "FREDERICK GUTHRIE * 1883-1886". Reverse inscriptions: "THE INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS AND THE PHYSICAL SOCIETY .... RERUM COGNOSCERE CAUSAS" (Latin for 'to know the causes of things').
Since issuance of this, the senior award of the Society, only began in 1966, only 42 have been issued. It is issued for an internationally outstanding body of work in physics. From 1914 to 1966, the Guthrie Prize was issued without a Medal. (In 2008 its name will become the Faraday Medal.) Other Guthrie Prize winners included Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr, Max Plank, Rudolf Peierls, and Max Born. The Prize consists of £1000 and a certificate.
Included are a 48 page dossier (in an Itoya Evolution Portfolio, w/ pages in a 2-column magazine-style format) about Chadwick and the Guthrie Prize, and the following books:
Brown, Andrew, The Neutron and the Bomb: A Biography of Sir James Chadwick (Oxford 1997);
Bundy, McGeorge, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (Random House, 1988);
Chadwick, James, Radioactivity and Radioactive Substances (Pitman, 1934);
Chadwick, J., Radiations from Radioactive Substances (with E. Rutherford and C.D. Ellis; Cambridge, 1930);
Clark, Ronald W., The Birth of the Bomb: the revealing history of the international race to develop the weapon that changed the world (Horizon, 1961); and,
ed. Lewis, John L., OBE, FInstP, 125 Years of the Physical Society and the Institute of Physics (Taylor & Francis, 1999)
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The Institute of Physics is a scientific membership organization devoted to increasing the understanding and application of physics, headquartered in London. It has an extensive worldwide membership (currently over 34,000) and is a leading communicator of physics with all audiences from specialists through government to the general public. Its publishing company, IOP Publishing, is a world leader in scientific publishing and the electronic dissemination of physics.
Frederick Guthrie (1833 - 1886) (born Graeme Gooday Frederick Guthrie) was a British scientific writer and professor. He helped found the Physical Society of London (now the Institute of Physics) in 1874 and was president of the society from 1876. He wrote the Elements of Heat in 1868 and Magnetism and Electricity in 1873.The first reported use of mustard gas was by a man named Frederick Guthrie in 1860, who combined ethylene with SCl2 (sulfur dichloride), and observed the toxic effects of this mixture on his own skin. Guthrie was also a linguist, playwright, and poet. Under the name Frederick Cerny, he wrote the poems “The Jew” (1863) and “Logrono” (1877).
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SIR JAMES CHADWICK (1891-1974) lived an exemplary, interesting, and historically important life. After searching eight years, "working day and night for three legendary weeks" in 1932, (as put by the official historian of the British Atomic Energy Authority) he discovered the neutron, and, largely for this achievement, would always be known as the ideal experimentalist; this discovery is generally considered to be one of the 100 most significant events in the history of science, and made Page One of the New York Times immediately upon his announcement of the discovery. Without Chadwick's discovery in 1932, nuclear fission, and thus the A-bomb, would have been achieved too late to be used against Japan to decide the end of WWII; thus the U.S. and U.S.S.R. would probably have ended up undeterred from later waging nuclear war against each other.
Until recently, Chadwick's major contribution to the success of the Manhattan Project, including in his role as Senior British Advisor, had been obscured by his tendency to shun the limelight. He has since been described as having been Project chief Gen. Groves' viceroy among the scientists, and his Spring 1941 research, conducted under the most trying conditions, led to the decisive MAUD Report, which persuaded FDR to launch the Manhattan Project, in the fall of 1941. That Einstein, not Chadwick, is seen as the Bomb's grandfather owes to Einstein's 1939 letter to FDR (warning that a Bomb was possible) being more famous, but less influential, than Chadwick's research. McGeorge Bundy's history of Bomb politics makes clear how over-rated Eistein's famous letter is.
Chadwick worked from a shoestring budget, using a cyclotron bought partly with his Nobel Prize money, while the Nazis were bombing his U. of Liverpool physics dept. and the rest of the city, in Spring 1941; conditions for Oppenheimer, etc., at Los Alamos were utterly blissful compared to those in 1941 Liverpool. Few stories, esp. in the history of science, exceed this in its combination of high stakes and dramatic appeal. U.S. officials delayed expenditure on a Bomb, until Chadwick, whose judgment as an important Nobel Laureate they most respected, had personally verified this investment's viability. As supervisor of all atomic researchers in Britain since June 1940, he was designated to write the final draft of the vital MAUD Report, which held that a Bomb was "not only possible, but inevitable;" presentation of MAUD to Roosevelt in Fall 1941 led FDR to order launching of the Manhattan Project, which more than any other factor would define the U.S. to be a superpower.
Respected Bomb scholar R. Rhodes notes that Allied statesmen's real doubts, regarding this unprecedentedly-costly proposal's viability, required them to have unprecedented trust in their scientists' judgment; thus Chadwick was one of the decisive movers of the 20th Century.
"Like the neutron he discovered, Chadwick moved unnoticed - but with awesome power." -- William Lanouette, Senior Analyst for energy and science issues at the U.S. Government Accountability Office, 1991- 2006
PROVENENCE: Many of Chadwick's awards, incl. his Nobel Prize medal and diploma, and his Guthrie Medal, were obtained by me (and a colleague) via auction when they were offered by his daughters, at Glendining's in London, on 15 November 1995.
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