THOMAS HOWELL LABY

1880-1946

T homas H owell L aby was born on 3 May 1880, at Creswick, Victoria, Australia. Creswick is about nine miles north of Ballarat; it came into existence in 1842, in ‘the squatting era’, and entered its ‘gold era’ in 1852. In those early days it was one of the first twelve towns of Victoria, but to-day it is one of the small towns of the State. For such a small place it boasts a remarkable number of men of great distinction. An unusual amount of detail is readily accessible in two books by a Creswick man, J. A. Graham: The Creswick Grammar School (1940)—a school of which Laby wrote, ‘a most distinguished school created by a great schoolmaster’; and Early Creswick (1942). The school may well have accounted for the quality of the town; Laby, unfortunately, got no benefit of it.

The analogy that springs to one’s mind, as one thinks of Laby’s rather amazing career, is that of Michael Faraday, if for back street London one substitutes small townships in the Australian ‘bush’. Not that Laby was of humble birth. His father, Thomas James Laby, was a leading citizen of Creswick and a prosper­ous flour-mill owner, who had been Mayor of the Borough in 1871. He was born in London, in 1825, and was of French extraction, his grandfather having (Laby understood) been ‘a silk merchant in Lyons’. It appears that he had in 1883 contemplated retiring, comfortably off, to the Channel Islands: this also would have meant good educational opportunities for his children (two daughters and the boy, who was the youngest child). ‘Unfortunately’ (Laby’s notes say), ‘he changed his mind at the last moment, and decided to invest some £24,000 in a rope-works in New South Wales’ (about twenty miles north-west of Sydney). ‘In the short period of four years this fine factory was built and equipped with modern machinery.’ But by that time he was more than sixty years of age and his health failed under the strain of the new venture; ‘no one else was prepared to carry it on in a free-trade State’, with a Victorian tariff against what would otherwise have been profitable trade with that State; so there was no option, apparently, to what Laby called ‘liquidation’.

Laby’s mother—some twenty-five years younger than her husband (born in Wales: maiden name, Jane Eudora Lewis)—made a courageous effort, under advice which proved unsound, to maintain husband and children on a dairy farm; but the husband died in 1888 and she was unable to make a success of the farm. Thereafter she had a long hard struggle to bring up her three children. She carried on a small boarding school for girls in the hill country some seventy miles south-west of Sydney. This is now a health resort for the Sydney well-to- do, and the location of some great boarding schools for their children.

734 Obituary NoticesIn these circumstances, at that stage of Australia’s development, Laby was

sent to a succession of ‘bush’ schools where (he said afterwards) he learnt little or nothing—except from one master, better equipped than others, who en­couraged him to read books like Seeley’s Expansion of England and Hallam’s History of Europe (a significant detail, in relation to what was, as we shall see, to become one of his major life’s interests). He learnt early ‘how poor (his) memory’ for ‘learning by rote’. He ‘planned (his) own studies’, and had obviously begun thinking for himself, as quite a young boy, and reading whatever of physics and chemistry came his way; but the only further note throwing light on that situation says that he ‘took tuition in mathematics by correspondence’, and was much impressed by ‘the precision of such teaching’. (He had, of course, quite definite aptitude for the subject.) He mentions also (in another context) that he ‘wrote an article for a country newspaper at the age of fourteen!’

That there are compensating advantages in education by the hard school of experience, no one will deny; and these were evident in the quite exceptional originality of Laby’s approach to real problems, in the sureness of his touch, and in the keenness of his insight. Everything he knew—and, in the end, its range was amazing—he had won for himself in quite unusual measure. One curious effect of his lack of a good secondary school education was that he seemed always alert to the possibility that he might be ignorant of odds and ends of the common heritage of his kind, and developed highly scientific methods of safeguarding himself from adverse consequences of such ignorance.

At the age of eighteen he had ‘passed the Junior and Senior Public Examina­tions in Mathematics, History and some other subject’, but he had ‘extreme difficulty’ in learning subjects like French and Latin—and even English— ‘as an examination subject’. He says he was warned that he would not be able to qualify for matriculation—and that that proved to be an accurate forecast. It is surely unique that a Fellow of the Royal Society, in the academic world of this century, should never have passed a matriculation examination nor been an ordinary undergraduate.

In 1398 he went with his mother to live in Sydney, the immediate purpose being to earn his living and make a contribution to the family income. He found employment in the Taxation Department, but after a month or two applied for a junior position in the chemical laboratory of the N.S.W. Depart­ment of Agriculture, for which there was competitive examination. In this context he made his first contact with men of scientific standing who encouraged him in his aspiration to pursue a scientific career. One, Dr J. M. Petrie, of Sydney Technical College, coached him for a week or two in chemistry for the competitive examination, in which he proved successful—because, appar­ently, of the excellence of his practical work. The chief chemist of the department

Mr F. B. Guthrie, F.C.S. seems to have been so much impressed with his ability and his promise that he recommended him, in the following year (1900), for a junior demonstratorship in the Chemistry School of the University. That modest university position was the first turning point in Laby’s career. While

Thomas Howell Laby 735working there with such colleagues as Mawson and Griffith Taylor, he was able to attend lectures in mathematics, physics and chemistry. In this way he pursued something like a normal university science course.

During the five years, 1900-1904, of his work on the st^ff of the Chemistry School, Laby established himself as a scientific worker of exceptional independ­ence and originality. Carslaw—who went to Sydney as the Professor of Mathematics in 1903—says: ‘I used to meet him in the Library of the Royal Society of N.S.W. . . . a reasonably good one in the matter of periodicals. Laby was usually on the search for references and was obviously keenly interested in research.’ In the list of his published papers two belong to that period, both published (in 1904 and 1905 respectively) in the Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of N .S.W ., and reprinted in the Chemical News. The second of these was in collaboration with Mawson, the title of the paper being ‘Preliminary observations on radioactivity and the occurrence of radium in Australian minerals’. A later paper, ‘On a pitchblende probably occurring in New South Wales’, published in the same journal in 1909, formed with this (he himself commented) ‘an account of a continuous investigation’ and

‘records the first discovery of radium in Australia. The publication of this work [in 1905] encouraged prospectors to search for radioactive minerals, and to send them to the University of Sydney for examination. The pitch­blende, of which the composition and radioactive properties are described, was one of the minerals so obtained by me. There is every reason to believe it was found in Australia, but it has not been rediscovered.’

These quotations have been made to emphasize Laby’s characteristic capacity —even as quite a young man, and comparatively untrained—for being always abreast of the times, and even ahead of them, on the things that were going to matter most.

Sir Douglas Mawson has been so good as to supply the following note:‘ . . . He was in those days somewhat different from other students,

which I always ascribed to the fact that his early education was almost entirely achieved . . . by private study. He kept very much to himself . . . but was an indefatigable reader and worker in chemistry and physics. . . . I joined with him in the investigation of radioactivity in Australian minerals, testing a very large range of mineral substances in the museums of Sydney—the first piece of work to be done on radioactivity on Australian minerals, in some of which we proved the presence of radium. At that time he regularly worked back, executing research investigation late at night and on Saturday afternoons and Sundays. . . . He never found time for outdoor sports, but devoted his entire time to reading and work in the laboratory. He applied himself very keenly to scientific research, and even in those days had a marked flair for it and a well-developed critical faculty. He was always sincere and would never beat about the bush, but go directly to the point he wished to make. . . . His keenness for research

y^6 Obituary Noticesno doubt stimulated my own interest in pure science: I had originally graduated as a mining engineer.’

The second—and critically important—turning point in Laby’s career was, of course, the 1904 Sydney award of the T851\ This was an astonishing achieve­ment, in the circumstances of his case: ‘an unmatriculated student, devoid of the normal kind of academic distinction. (The Registrar of the University, in a memo, kindly supplied through the writer’s friend, Professor Harold Dew, mentions that ‘in his second year Laby is shown to have secured top place in Chemistry II, with a mark equivalent to First Class Honours’.) Carslaw remarks that these scholarships ‘would usually go to good graduates , but that Laby ‘had made some reputation for himself in the University by his research work ; and the extract from the 1904 Annual Report, sent (as above) by the Registrar, says of the award: ‘Mr Laby was for three years a distinguished student in the Faculty of Science, having made some valuable investigations in the Department of Chemistry which have been already recognized by the Royal Society of London’. It is this last point that supplies the key to the mystery. Laby himself said that ‘it was to . . . Lord Rayleigh, then President of the Royal Society’, especially, he owed the award:

‘I sent’ (wrote Laby) ‘to Lord Rayleigh a proposed method for verifying whether the change of weight in a chemical reaction, which Dr Landolt had observed, was a reality. . . . I referred in considerable detail to Professor J. H. Poynting’s use of the balance to determine the mean density of the earth—a supreme example of precision physics. Lord Rayleigh replied saying the Royal Society would 'defray the cost of the investigation proposed’,

if Laby were nominated for an ‘1851’, to work with Poynting at Birmingham. It is a characteristic episode: Laby was battling for his chance, and finding the encouragement he so much needed—and merited.

He did not delay—as is customary with our men going overseas—until the middle of the year (1905), but occupied the time-lag between the academic years in the two hemispheres by proceeding at once to Birmingham. Of his experiences there he wrote: ‘I came to regard Poynting as a genius, both as an experimental and as a theoretical physicist, but whose modesty was so innate that he did not take himself seriously as a theoretical physicist; and experi­mental physics was to him just a hobby. To come under the influence of such a man was a supreme privilege. . . .’

But Poynting strongly advised the Cavendish Laboratory, as the place where Laby should work—for obvious reasons, peculiarly applicable to his case (that of a man who had so far had no normal university life); and, in fact, four full academic years at Cambridge made all the difference in the world to Laby: in a sense, it was his first period of regular education.

He entered Cambridge University for the academic year 1905-1906, being

Thomas Howell Laby nyiadmitted as an ‘advanced student’ under the statute introduced just ten years before—one of the first ‘advanced students’ being Rutherford.1 That provision saved Rutherford and his contemporaries from undergraduate preliminaries; but it opened the doors to Laby, who would have had no other possible chance of getting in. After two years he was granted the ‘B.A. degree by research’ (June 1907), qualifying by ‘two theses (1) on the ionization produced by a-particles, (2) on the supersaturation and nuclear condensation of organic vapours’. (These theses led to papers published, respectively, in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, May 1907, and in the Philosophical Transactions, August 1908.) In 1907, the ‘185T award was renewed for a third year; and Laby won also, that year, the Joule Studentship of the Royal Society.

In his first year he ‘kept terms as non-coil.’—no doubt for reasons of economy; thereafter, at Emmanuel; and he would be resident in the college during the long vacations at least. It was the award by Emmanuel of a Research Exhibition (of like value to the T85T) which enabled him to remain at Cambridge one more year (1908—1909): the college also awarding him (later in that year) its Sudbury-Hardyman Prize (for a thesis, open to B.A.’s of the college).

Of his work at the Cavendish, Sjjr J. J. Thomson wrote (in January 1909):

‘Mr Laby of Emmanuel College . . . has made many important investigations. . . . I have been greatly impressed by Mr Laby’s skill as an experimenter, in fact I do not remember, after a long experience, any one who has excelled him in this respect. He has a wide and accurate knowledge of Physics and is in addition a good chemist. This enables him to undertake, successfully, researches which would be impossible for any one who knew only one of these subjects.’

This was written in support of Laby’s candidature for the (new) Chair of Physics at Wellington, New Zealand (to which he was appointed).

Laby mentions that he attended the lectures of Dr H. O. Jones, F.R.S., on chemistry, and Dr McTaggart’s philosophy class for students of science, as well as Sir J. J. Thomson’s lectures to his advanced students; and that, at the time when he left Cambridge, he was ‘secretary of the committee which was in charge of the arrangements for commemorating the twenty-fifth year of Sir J. J. Thomson’s tenure of the Cavendish Chair of Experimental Physics’—a com­mittee which subsequently published A history of the Cavendish Laboratory, 1871 to1900.

In the list of Laby’s published papers, those dated 1906—1909 belong to this period: two of them in collaboration with G. A. Carse, and one with G. W. C. Kaye. Their general character is that of the precision measurements of physical constants, to which he devoted most of his life’s work. But one, on ‘A string electrometer’, may perhaps be specially mentioned, as the electrometer in question—designed ‘with the help of the Cambridge Instrument Co.’—‘was exhibited at the Royal Society in 1909’, an occasion of which Laby wrote: ‘Sir Ernest Rutherford and Dr Geiger kindly allowed me to show the instrument

1 See Feather’s Lord Rutherford, pp. 35—36.

738 Obituary Noticescounting a-rays by the method which they had just devised. This was, I believe, the first occasion on which the counting of atoms electrically had been shown publicly’; while Rutherford wrote: ‘If the movements of the quartz fibre of the string electrometer are photographically recorded . . . it is possible to detect with certainty the effect of each individual a-particle, even when 1,000 a- particles enter the detecting vessel per minute’. This must have been one of Laby’s first contacts with Rutherford, in what became a fast friendship which lasted till Rutherford’s unexpected death in 1937—a great personal sorrow to Laby.

It is convenient to add at this point that Laby graduated M.A. in 1913, and Sc.D. in 1921.

In May 1909 Laby entered upon his duties as Professor of Physics at Victoria University College, Wellington, in the University of New Zealand.2 Until that year physics had been taught as a side-line, for about ten years, by Easterfield (now Sir Thomas), the Professor of Chemistry; so Laby had both the advantage and the disadvantage of making a fresh start in the organizing and equipping of a School of Physics. The new laboratory (on very modest lines) was formally opened in 1910, with a demonstration of experiments—such as became a characteristic feature of Laby’s appeal to university and public, on special occasions.

But the opportunities for the kind of work of which Laby was capable were very limited; and it may be questioned whether he did wisely—from that point of view—in going to New Zealand. This he himself fully realized. He had been largely influenced in applying for that Chair by the wish to return to Australasia and be within reach of his mother, whom he visited on his way out, only to learn that she was in an advanced condition of cancer, with not many months to live. While in Sydney he gave an interview to the Press, in which he, very characteristically, spoke his mind about the defects of the New Zealand university system, as it then was, thus firing his first shots in the campaign for university reform in New Zealand (then shaping in Wellington), to which much of his energy was to be devoted in the years immediately following.

It became apparent that Laby had no natural faculty for talking fluently to classes of students in the lecture-room. This fact was bound up with his lack of an ordinary general education, but also with a certain, almost physical, diffidence—which was strangely at variance with the quite exceptional confid­ence and assurance of this remarkable man’s mind. He would never have made a good schoolmaster; but he was, in fact, a very great university teacher (if emphasis is laid upon the true meaning of ‘university’), as should be clear from the later part of this account of his life.

2 It was then that there began the relationship of colleague and friend with the present writer (who had gone out to the Chair of Mathematics in Wellington in 1908); a relationship which was to last, without a break, for thirty-seven years—in Wellington and Melbourne—till the day of his death.

Thomas Howell Laby 739To this period belongs the first edition of ‘Kaye and Laby’3—of which Laby

himself wrote: ‘When I came to New Zealand, being unable to undertake experimental research for want of apparatus, I gave my time to the completion of this book’—of which the plan had been laid down, and the scheme of collabora­tion launched, while the authors were working together at the Cavendish Laboratory. The preface to that first edition (1911) states that ‘Dr G. A. Carse shared in its inception’ and that the authors ‘owe much’ to Mr G. F. C. Searle, F.R.S., ‘for his encouragement and suggestions when the scope of the book was under consideration’. The book met, at once, with most favourable reception by highly competent reviewers, and by workers in physics at all stages. The second and third editions were published during World War I. Edition after edition followed: every opportunity being taken for thorough revision, right up to date. The latest to appear was the ninth (1941), produced under pressure (in 1939—1940) for special needs of war-time, and followed by ‘new impressions’ in 1943 and 1944, while publication of a tenth edition (about which see further below), for which another rapid revision (in 1943-1944) had gone overseas, was being held up in London by grave circumstances of the blitz. A review of the ninth edition, in the Times Educational Supplement of 21 February 1942, may be quoted as representative of highly competent opinion:

‘ “Then I felt like some watcher of the sky!” That was thirty years ago, when the writer found in the first “Kaye and *Laby” not only scientific tables and mathematical functions, but a complete sphere of information, together with that something—inspiration, perhaps—which goes far deeper. Throughout those thirty years “Kaye and Laby” has been the constant reference book of all scientific workers and particularly of students of physics. It has seemed to answer every question that the advanced research worker could ask, for the frequent revisions have incorporated the results of the most recent research. . . . To say that there is not a branch of physics which is not well covered by this encyclopaedic volume is to pay only proper tribute to its amazing comprehensiveness. . . . As a book of reference it is invaluable, and it is a textbook through which one can browse with undoubted profit. Special attention should be called to the sections on atomic physics which have been entirely re-written by Professor Laby and his collaborators, who have gathered together the most recent data in this important field. . . . A monumental work. . . .’

\This has been dwelt upon for two reasons: (1) because the book is typical

of the method and the thoroughness of Laby’s work as a university teacher; (2) because the work on it was a kind of thread running through the whole of his activities as a research worker and director of research. We shall see that it was the last specific scientific interest of his life.

3 Tables of physical and chemical constants and some mathematical functions, by G. W. C. Kaye and T. H. Laby. The mathematical tables—afterwards also published separately and widely sold—were included because of the need for accuracy in the scheme of approximation of such tables.

740 Obituary NoticesThe spirit of research was, as it chanced, very much alive in Victoria Univer­

sity College; and it was greatly stimulated by Laby in the five years or so he was working there. The present Principal of the College (and Vice-Chancellor of the University of New Zealand), Sir Thomas Hunter—who was our Philosophy colleague—writes:

‘He soon made his influence felt and, although the space available was not large, in a very short time he had organized a physical laboratory, together with a workshop, modestly equipped, but under a first-rate mechanic who turned out much of the apparatus needed for teaching and research in Physics. . . . Out of his private funds he provided a research scholarship, and it was not long before he had the best of his students manifesting the same zeal as himself in the problems of investigation. . . .’

Of these men, two were awarded ‘1851’ scholarships and went to the Cavendish Laboratory and Trinity College, Cambridge. Investigations with one of these (P. W. Burbidge, now Professor of Physics at Auckland), ‘On fluctuation in the ionization due to y-rays’, were published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in 1912 and 1913. With the other (E. O. Hercus, now Associate Professor in the University of Melbourne), investigations on heat were begun—and, subsequently, continued in Melbourne: these were published in 1919 and 1927. Burbidge writes: ‘His urge to research, his insistence to authorities on its importance and his foundation of precision work were contribu­tions of outstanding value to Physics in New Zealand’.

Hunter, in the note quoted above, goes on to refer to Laby’s part in the movement for University Reform in New Zealand—of which Victoria College was the head and front. The historian of the University of New Zealand says that ‘the spearhead (and for a period the spear) was found in Victoria College’4 and he names four professors who were, in fact, that spearhead—two of whom were Hunter and Laby. Hunter was himself a New Zealand graduate; Laby, at that time, our junior professor; both were men of practical ability and immense energy and driving force; and to them, especially, the movement owed its thorough and effective organization—and its eventual striking success. With influential support from leading citizens, we launched a University Reform Association. In its name an enquiry on two main issues (the system of examina­tions and the place of professors in the government of the university and of its constituent university colleges) was sent to leading university authorities all over the English-speaking world. This met with a remarkable response; and the sixty-five replies were included, as an appendix, in the volume (of some two hundred pages) on University reform in New Zealand (of which Laby was one of the three editors), published in Wellington in 1911.

The success of the movement stands out of the pages of Beaglehole’s historical study; and Laby’s contribution to that success could hardly be over-estimated.

4 The University of New Zealand: an historical study by J. C. Beaglehole (New Zealand Council for Educational Research), p. 178. •

Thomas Howell Laby 741Hunter says that Laby ‘threw himself into the new movement for freedom with all the zeal which characterized his actions; . . . as a painstaking and conscientious investigator of the facts he could not be surpassed. . . .’

It should, perhaps, be added that the educational value to ourselves of the process of discussion and enquiry was immense. That process amounted to a considerable corporate research into the true conception of ‘university’. The present writer, to whom this was to prove of special importance, has always felt that he owed it peculiarly (like much else) to the vision and initiative of Laby.

To this period belongs the beginning of another of the major interests of Laby’s life, viz. that of the Round Table Movement—‘a co-operative enterprise’ for promotion of the British Commonwealth of Nations and of its beneficial influence in the modern world; the beginning also of his lifelong friendship with Lionel Curtis and others of that famous group of remarkable men which originated as ‘Milner’s kindergarten’ in South Africa after the Boer War. In Curtis’s own words:

‘I met Laby first when I reached New Zealand in 191Q. The South African Union, for which we had worked, had just been consummated. The shadow of the Great War was already lengthening across the land­scape. We were faced by the question what our position as British subjects would be if, in the event of war with Germany, a South African Govern­ment were to commit the Union to neutrality. We had therefore decided to put our problem before our friends in the other Dominions, and I was sent to New Zealand for that purpose. On arrival at Wellington I got into touch with the Atkinsons, Laby and others, who agreed to form the first Round Table Group to study the Imperial problem with us ( . . . groups were afterwards started in Australia and Canada). From then onwards, Laby and Arnold Atkinson became my intimate friends as long as they lived. It was the energy of these two which secured for The Round Table quarterly in New Zealand the largest circulation it has had per head of the population in any country. The Round Table Group in London was in constant touch with the Wellington Group. When war came in 1914 that group cabled asking our advice, and in reply we suggested that the New Zealand Group should use its influence to get an all-party government. When I reached New Zealand in 1916 I was told that the formation of the national government was largely due to the influence brought to bear on party leaders by Laby and Atkinson, in personal interviews. By then Arnold Atkinson had gone to the front, where he was afterwards killed— an irreparable loss. . . . Laby had gone to Melbourne, where I saw him when I got there. Then, as ever since, he was persistent in his belief that, unless the British Commonwealth were united for the common defence, it must sooner or later break up into independent states. . . . In 1919 he was with us in London. . . . Thenceforward he made a practice, every few years, of coming through North America to Europe. . . . He

ja2 Obituary Noticesalways stayed with me in Oxford, where I arranged for him to meet professors of physics and chemistry. It was on these occasions that I realized that of all the men of science I had known Laby was . . . the most intent on knowledge for its own intrinsic worth. . . . In 1938 my wife and I stayed with the Labys at Melbourne after the British Common­wealth Relations Conference near Sydney. . . . I remember attending a group of leading men who agreed that under no circumstances would Australia consent to merge her national sovereignty with other democracies. Laby was silent . . . till this conclusion was reached. Then he looked up and said in a quiet voice, “Gentlemen, you would come to a different conclusion if you were to work in a physical laboratory” . The incident is significant of the realistic view of politics to which the study of physics had led Laby.’

(Arnold Atkinson—son of Sir Harry Atkinson, a former Premier of New Zealand—was secretary, Laby treasurer, of the Group; Arthur Atkinson, a cousin, Oxford-trained, was one of New Zealand’s most distinguished sons —in law, literature and politics. The Melbourne meeting referred to was a meeting of the Round Table Group with Curtis, Lord Lothian and others of the London Group—all alert to fly back to England should war then be declared.)

Laby, in fact, so organized his affairs as to go out into the world, on scientific quests, as often as he reasonably could: in the 1913-1914 Long Vacation; in 1919; in 1925-1926; in 1929-1930; and in 1936; generally on important public missions.

Though by no means ‘hail fellow’ he had a remarkable faculty for making friends with outstanding men all over the world—who thereupon maintained lifelong friendship by letter. Instances that come to mind are Sinclair Kennedy (Putnam County, New York State), of ‘Pan-Angles’ fame (of whom Laby wrote that he ‘had the ability to foresee in international relations . . . the future of their development, to a degree which to me has appeared uncanny’); and J. H. Curie, the noted mining engineer, world traveller and author. The range of his scientific friendships was immense—from Rayleigh and Rutherford on to all those who have written to Mrs Laby since he died; and he had very wide­spread Round Table contacts.

He had a deep and abiding interest in world affairs and public questions, to the study of which he applied, with unusual power, the principles and the methods of his scientific investigations. He made a special study of Empire Defence and (in that context) of ‘sea power’; and, from time to time, as occasion arose, he wrote for the Press articles on these questions which commanded wide interest and had considerable influence.

The other major fact of Laby’s Wellington period was his marriage to Beatrice Littlejohn, whose father was head of a leading firm of jewellers and opticians in New Zealand and a man of high standing in the community. His

Thomas Howell Laby 743brother was that W. S. Littlejohn of whom Feather, in his Lord ,5tells that he was Rutherford’s ‘teacher in mathematics and science’ at Nelson College—adding that ‘all Rutherford knew of physics when he entered the university’ (at Christchurch, New Zealand) ‘he may fairly be said to have learnt in private tuition from Littlejohn’. (Littlejohn was, afterwards, Head of Nelson College, then of Scotch College, Melbourne.) By this time, Laby had become one of Rutherford’s proteges,having made contacts with him while at Cambridge(when Rutherford was at Manchester); and the relationship ripened into intimate personal friendship, in which their wives fully shared. In later days, the Labys were always welcome at the home of the Rutherfords in Cambridge; and the Rutherfords when in Melbourne stayed with them.

The marriage took place in London, in February 1914, and they visited Canada and U.S.A. on their way back to New Zealand. Laby was fortunate, indeed, in the woman he married—both in the companionship and co-operation of his happy home, and in the grace added to his whole life. There are two daughters of the marriage: the elder, Jean, is a graduate in *science and a senior demonstrator in the Melbourne School of Physics, invaluable as an assistant to her father, and eventually one of his collaborators in the later editions of ‘Kaye and Laby’.

When we came to Melbourne in 1915,6 we transferred to membership of the Round Table Group there (to take first, for convenience, completion of that part of this record). It was a very remarkable group of men Curtis had got together, several of whom rose to positions of great distinction. The chair­man was Harrison Moore (afterwards Sir William), Dean of the Faculty of Law and a world-famed constitutional authority. The (Australian) secretary was Eggleston (afterwards Sir Frederic), who subsequently (with Harrison Moore and others of the Group) was a member of the Australian delegation to the 1919 Peace Conference—later a Minister of the Crown in Victoria, and, in recent years, Australian Minister Resident, first in China, then in U.S.A.; he was chairman of the Group after Harrison Moore died in 1936.

Eggleston says he has always regarded Laby as his ‘best friend’, and he now writes:

‘When I joined the A.I.F. in 1916, Laby took up my position as Australian secretary of the Round Table, and, after I returned in 1919, I constantly worked with him. . . . During the .whole time we co-operated most cordially and affectionately. Laby had a universal interest in affairs. He was a great physicist, but he had a profound knowledge of social philosophy and politics. He had a more realistic view of these things than most scientists.. . . He understood their complexity, and he understood human nature; and his views on social subjects were extremely valuable. This made him

5 Pp. 19, 20.6 The writer had succeeded MacFarland (afterwards Sir John) as Master of Ormond College,

within the University of Melbourne, a month or two before Laby took office as a professor of that university.

744 Obituary Noticesan unsurpassed secretary for the Round Table; and the efficiency of the Australian contribution’ (to The Round Table quarterly) ‘was largely due to his unwearying zeal. . . .

‘When the Round Table was inaugurated in 1910, it warned us of the coming German war, and it has recorded, with fidelity and truth, the whole series of world-shaking events which have occurred since that date. Work­ing with Laby during the whole of this period, one watched a truly scientific mind interpreting the complex of fluctuating forces that have moved the world. He was neither an optimist nor a pessimist; he was a critical, con­structive realist with a confident faith in the mission of the British peoples in this crisis, and a strong hope that they would be permitted to play the part for which they were so well fitted. The work that Laby put into these extra activities was colossal, and one can realize how much this, added to exacting physical research and the conduct of a great laboratory, contri­buted to his early death. One cannot think and work yvith such intensity as he did without suffering for it. But, before he died, he had made a great mark on Australian science, and had done important work for the British Commonwealth. ’

Laby’s contacts—both personal and by letter—with a brilliant sequence of the editors in London,7 had indeed a very large part in the Australasian share in the work of the Round Table for the British Commonwealth of Nations (and not only through the quarterly Dominion articles).

Laby succeeded the distinguished mathematical physicist, Professor (after­wards Sir Thomas) Lyle, F.R.S., as Professor of Natural Philosophy in the University of Melbourne, in March 1915. He had been strongly supported by Sir J. J. Thomson, by Larmor and by Rutherford; and it was on Rutherford’s recommendation that he was appointed. Sir J. J. Thomson added to his earlier testimony that he had ‘had pupils of Professor Laby working at the Cavendish Laboratory and had never met with any who were better, or more carefully, trained’.

The colleagues whom we joined in Melbourne were men of great repute: in the Science Faculty, four Fellows of the Royal Society (then, or soon after), Baldwin Spencer, Orme Masson, J. H. Michell, A. J. Ewart; and in other Faculties, and in the Colleges, men of like calibre. Among these the Labys made many good (and lifelong) friends.

It was war-time; and that meant the diverting of energies—more particularly, in Laby’s case—from normal establishing in a new sphere of work, to war service of many kinds, on his own part and on that of his university department. At this distance of time, and with all that has since happened, little record of the detail of that (largely secret) work remains; but one important achievement (on which Laby, for a variety of reasons, himself laid stress) was the invention

in collaboration with two professorial colleagues, Osborne (Physiology) andPhilip Kerr (Lord Lothian), John Dove, Geoffrey Dawson, (Sir) Edward Grigg, (Sir)

Reginald Coupland. . . .

Thomas Howell Laby 745Orme Masson (Chemistry)—of what is believed to have been the first efficient anti-gas respirator for the 1914-1918 war. Osborne, in an essay on ‘Poison gas and the evolution of the respirator’,8 says it was evolved from ‘a device invented by Zuntz’, used in his (Osborne’s) laboratory in metabolism experiments (and partly developed by his technical assistant). ‘Professor Laby enlarged and im­proved the valves and, by proper specification of materials, their quality and dimensions, made it possible for mass production to be easily undertaken.’ (And, in fact, among Laby’s possessions he has left an elaborate paper—of twelve typewritten foolscap sheets—on ‘The Melbourne University respirator’,9 dealing systematically with the principles, the apparatus and the test experi­ments, and with directions and specifications—on lines characteristic of the thoroughness and accuracy of all his work.) Osborne adds: ‘Our respirator was devised to withstand chlorine; had we been informed of the use of phosgene and other gases we could have made the requisite changes in size and contents.. . . Professor J. S. Haldane warmly commended it. . . . The box respirator eventually adopted bore a striking resemblance in form to ours. . . .’

At the end of a period when brilliant lecture-room performance had loomed so large in university teaching—and in a university unsurpassed in great teach­ing of that kind—Laby had none of that gift. But he was masterly in the organiz­ing capacity which is so essential to a modern school of experimental science; and very quickly—even under the disabilities of war-time—he had transformed an old (but, fortunately, large) building into an adequately equipped modern physical institute with a first-rate workshop. For a time he left the mathematical physics (never, of course, his field) to be carried on by the distinguished Senior Lecturer, Dr E. F. J. Love (brother of A. E. H. Love), while he set himself to the task of infusing the modern spirit into the work of the whole school. (How successful he proved in this is made clear by Massey, one of his students, and by Oliphant.)10

Like most other universities, we had a great influx of men in 1919—especially in science, engineering, medicine and the other Faculties rooted in physics and chemistry. For Laby there was no question of subordinating some of the problems, so presented, to others in which he was more peculiarly interested: all had to be solved to the best of his ability. Our intensive study, in New Zealand, of university problems as a whole, had convinced us of the evils in­volved in throwing too much of the onus on to an examination system; and Laby set himself to put examinations into their proper place—that of a useful servant, not that of a very bad master. Among the rough notes he left, there is this one on that question: ‘A conviction which has been burnt into me, as one who has been a university examiner from 1900 to the present time, is that university examinations are utterly overrated as a test of education and of human ability’.

8 Essays and studies by W. A. Osborne (Lothian Publishing Co., Melbourne), pp. 127-130.9 Called ‘the Masson respirator’ in the war records.10 See following footnote and page 753.

746 Obituary NoticesMassey comments on ‘his abolition of practical examinations , but seems

not quite to realize how much a matter of positive policy was involved, turning on a highly organized system of laboratory work for all the students, under the guidance and supervision of well-trained demonstrators. Most of the students obtained their ‘practical* passes on their work done, and recorded, week by week, throughout the year, in the laboratories—and reported upon by three different members of the staff; the method of ‘practical examination’ being applied only as ‘second chance’ for the doubtful cases. Those who had done a good year’s practical work seldom had serious difficulty *with their written examination on ‘theory’, the basic principle being elimination of chance, to the utmost extent, in the ‘passing’ of candidates, and the regarding of a ‘pass’ as the natural conclusion to the year’s work of a reasonably qualified student. Examination papers were worked out scientifically by the staff of the school, so as to test sound knowledge and avoid trickiness.

Laby preferred to take whatever element of risk there might be in trusting the integrity of the student, as a serious worker, rather than sacrifice the best interests of the good student to any scheme of policing the untrustworthy. In this, he surely was right; and the policy was completely vindicated in practice. It worked well even with large numbers whose courses include only First Year Physics, but it was triumphantly successful in the higher years. Massey’s comment11 that ‘There existed throughout his department an air of enthusiasm and a feeling of complete confidence in the importance of the subject, which lent a distinction apparent to undergraduates as well as research students’ (italics supplied) is a highly significant tribute from such a source.

When one adds that much of the teaching material was embodied in carefully prepared, and continually revised, publications (very economically produced), and when one realizes that the spirit of the original thinker and worker ran through it all, the claim that Laby was a great university teacher will not appear exaggerated. Every third-year student found himself completely immersed in an atmosphere of modern research; and there resulted what Massey (loc. cit) calls ‘a remarkably regular production of very keen research students’. These (after graduating B.Sc.) pursued higher studies, and carried on research work, generally for more than one year (commonly for several years, with the help of scholarships and research grants); and the M.Sc. degree was obtained, in practically every case, ‘by research’.

Such an integrated unity of teaching-and-research—the authentic mark of ‘university’ work—was bound to produce a steady stream of professional physicists and original contributors to science. Actually, in the period of twenty years (1919-1938) between the wars, out of twenty-one ‘1851’ awards to the University of Melbourne, twelve went to Laby’s men; and by the work of these men and others, the school came to repute throughout the scientific world. (On occasions of ‘demonstration’, one has seen a whole lecture-table covered with scientific publications from all over the world, in which the work of the school was represented or cited.) It will be evident from the

11 S. W. Massey, F.R.S, in Nature, 158 no. 4005 (3 August 1946) for these quotations.

Thomas Howell Laby 747appended bibliography how wide was the range of original work done in the S C h o o l. '

From the ‘Kaye and Laby’ tables, it is obvious how exceptionally compre­hensive was Laby’s own accurate knowledge of the physics of practical applica­tions. The inevitable consequence was that he became the leading authority on a very great variety of such applications—not only in Victoria, but throughout Australia—always in the spirit of a servant of the community, rather than with any motive of personal gain. No man maintained a higher standard of personal and scientific integrity.

In 1918, he assisted the President of the Commonwealth Arbitration Court as his assessor on ‘the training, classification, etc.’ of some three hundred professional officers of the Commonwealth Public Service. Later he was intimately associated with the establishing of the Research Laboratory, in Melbourne, of the P.M.G.’s Department—instituting special courses at the university in the physics of telegraphy and telephony (work of a kind he had already done, on a more modest scale, in Wellington).

In the middle period of his professorship (before becoming immersed in the problems of the Second World War), he was Adviser to the Commonwealth Government on purchase of radium, and Consulting Physicist to their Depart­ment of Health on the use of X-rays and radium in the treatment of cancer (and in related research); and the physicist on a very highly expert Advisory Committee on Cancer to the Government of Victoria. He was a member of the Australian Radio-research Board (‘an executive committee of four members’); and he was Director of Research on Atmospherics.

He was also a member of the Executive Committee of the Imperial Geographi­cal Experimental Survey; and, on the untimely death of Dr Bieler of McGill University, Montreal (who had come to Australia as senior physicist, and deputy director, of the Survey), Laby became consultant physicist, subsequently collaborating with Broughton Edge in the editing of the volume on The principles and practice of geographical prospecting, published as a report by the Cambridge University Press in 1931.

Laby said that his own usefulness in these matters of national importance turned on his inquiries and investigations when periodically overseas—when he was generally commissioned to pursue such inquiries:

‘By visiting the research laboratories of the great American, British, Dutch and German electrical companies and that of the American Tele­phone Co., I learnt something of how research and invention were organized in electrical communication, both wired and wireless, the electron being applied in every conceivable way by the ingenuity of the physicists of these competing laboratories. I have visited the Schenectady and Eindhoven laboratories three times, the American Telephone and Wembley labora­tories twice. . . . Even a physicist well read in applied science can have no conception of the scale on which electrical research in relation to

jaS Obituary Noticesindustry is organized unless he has seen these laboratories and has met the distinguished men who lead their scientific personnel.

He had close relations with the engineering profession, especially through his friend and colleague, Professor Henry Payne who—as Dean of the Faculty of Engineering—did outstanding work for the profession in Victoria and throughout Australia, until he retired in 1932 and thereafter took a leading part in certain engineering industries. (He died a year before Laby.) The distin­guished engineer and inventor, A. G. M. Michell, F.R.S. (brother of our late mathematical colleague and friend, Professor J. H. Michell, F.R.S.), pays a tribute to ‘the depth and accuracy’ of Laby’s knowledge and to his ‘sincerity and disinterestedness’.

In 1931 Laby’s scientific work was given highest recognition by his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society, and congratulations flowed in from all over the world.

He was a Fellow of the Institute of Physics. He was keenly interested in ‘the organization of Australian physicists’, and he was the first President of the Australian Institute of Physics (a branch of the parent institute) which was fully organized in 1939.

He had been President of Section A of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science in 1911 and he occupied this office again in 1928.

In 1934, he applied for one of the Carnegie Corporation Grants for 1935-1936 for the purposes (1) of ‘visiting leading centres of research’ in other countries; (2) in particular, ‘to study the physics of high-voltage X-ray therapy’ and ‘to study the development of radio-research’; (3) ‘to write up researches’; (4) ‘to bring before the Carnegie and Rockfeller Institutions matters relating to research in physics in Australia’. One of the three grants was awarded to him (the others going to India and South Africa), and he was given the necessary leave of absence by the university. His report to the Universities Bureau—submitted also to the University of Melbourne—shows how characteristically wide and thorough and comprehensive were his inquiries and investigations. He said he had ‘given special attention to nuclear and X-ray physics’ and had ‘had the privilege of long conferences with Lord Rutherford’; and that he had gone carefully into the question of a ‘million volt X-ray generator’ for the X-ray laboratory of his school—arriving at somewhat astonishing conclusions about the economy with which the construction might be carried out, by the purchase of ‘component parts’.

What the outcome would have been in normal world conditions one can only guess. But one great solid piece of evidence exists. In the years just before war again broke upon the world, the Natural Philosophy Laboratory was extended (by a new wing), and entirely reconstructed so as to give increase of floor area from 20,000 to 30,000 sq. ft., so that Laby had at last a great laboratory designed and equipped to his heart’s desire (and with provision for ‘a future

Thomas Howell Laby 749three-storied structure’, based on the new wing). This was in use in 1939, and was publicly inaugurated by a characteristic demonstration on 25 August of that year, just a week before the outbreak of war: so that he himself hardly used it at all for the purposes for which it had been designed. But it served at once another very great purpose.

Nobody had a more realistic grasp of the world situation than Laby, or of his own personal obligations in the crisis; and from the very first day, he left no one—neither staff nor students—in any doubt that war service was the one and only thing to live for, till peace should come again. Every student was made to feel that he must justify himself by the most strenuous effort to prepare for self-sacrificing service of his country, in whatever capacity that might be required of him. Peace-time routine was drastically disrupted and all the con­structive work of the school was geared to the national effort.

Early attempts at direct war service by the laboratory were somewhat frustrated, but Laby’s own services were in constant requisition for scientific consultation and advice—by the Services and by Government departments— until his health began to fail at the end of 1943. Here belongs also the ninth edition revision of ‘Kaye and Laby’ (already referred to). Very soon, however, his own effort was focussed, and the energies of his laboratory concentrated, on the national work of ‘Optical Munitions’. This (as it was to prove) very remarkable Australian war-time achievement was essentially the child of Laby’s mind and initiative.

Even before the declaration of war the Australian Institute of Physics had (in August 1939) suggested to the Prime Minister a consultative committee of physicists to assist the Government in certain specific respects—every one of which proved to be an accurate forecast of eventual requirements. The sugges­tion was well received, but in the rush of events nothing was done about it until the Ministry of Munitions was established at the middle of 1940. The Ordnance Production Directorate consulted with Laby and representatives of the munitions laboratories about the possibility of manufacturing lenses in Australia for the scientific instruments necessary to ordnance production; and the ‘Optical Munitions Panel’ of the Directorate was formed—with Laby as its chairman. It was representative of the universities, the Government labora­tories, the Army, the Commonwealth Observatory and the Directorate itself (afterwards, also, of the Navy and the Air Force). Its secretary was a senior member of Laby’s staff, who had been a staff officer in the 191-4—1918 A.I.F. and was thus specifically qualified to act as liaison officer with the Services; and the headquarters of the Panel was established in Laby’s school. Two years later an Assistant-Controller of Optical Munitions was appointed to the Directorate, with great advantage to the wfyole project.

The output of the Optical Section of Ordnance Production was of a magnitude and importance it would be difficult to exaggerate. ‘A total of more than 27,000 optical instruments’ of ‘43 different and complex types’, were copied, or designed,

y co Obituary Noticesand manufactured: the groundwork—the prototypes, and the scientific investiga­tion and testing—being prepared by a great team of scientific workers in university and other laboratories all over Australia. The detail cannot (for a variety of obvious reasons) be set out here, but one feature of peculiar interest may be noted. Laby’s chemistry colleague, Professor E. J. Hartung, writes:

‘ . . . I remember him discussing with me the possibility of the supply of optical glass of Australian manufacture, and as soon as he had my assur­ance that we should be able to do this, he moved for the formation of a sub-committee of the Panel, of which he asked me to take charge. This committee . . . set about initiating the experimental work which finally led to the manufacture of optical glass . . . which was produced by October 1941—fourteen months after the initial work commenced. . .

This was an entirely new venture in Australia, which proved an outstanding success—with untold future possibilities.

All Laby’s own laboratory experience in design of instruments and apparatus came into play. One of nis notes says:

‘In the application of science and still more in invention, my experience has been quite haphazard. Sir Horace Darwin, F.R.S. (when, as a research student at Cambridge, I submitted to him what I considered to be a new type of electrometer), told me of the principles of scientific design upon which he relied, and I found them of absorbing interest. F. Twyman, F.R.S., head of the firm of Adam Hilger . . . in answer to questions which I put to him in 1936, described how he considered optical instru­ments of high quality . . . should be designed, and tested by means of the interference of light (the “Twyman Test”). Later . . . optical instru­ments were to be produced (under the O.M. Panel’s guidance) which were, in many instances, somewhat superior in optical performance to the War Office prototypes. I came to learn, too, that our optical specifica­tions were more scientific than those of the United States Army—and how profound were the principles I had learnt, by chance, from Twyman.’

In fact, the ruling passions of Laby’s life—the passion for scientific truth, and the passion for the cause of human freedom—had been welded into powerful unity ‘in the crucible of war’: war of which, in the end, he proved one of so many tragic casualties.

He did not see the work of the Panel through to a finish, withdrawing because of ill-health, and unnecessary worries, early in 1944. In those war-time years, his health was failing rapidly. He had always worked far too hard: indeed, it seemed that he did nothing but wyrk—if not at one thing, then at another; and one often felt great concern at the magnitude of the labours he undertook— beyond what flesh can endure. His chief relaxation had been world travel, but that for him was only incidentally holiday. A cottage which Mrs Laby had

Thomas Howell Laby 751had built on Port Phillip Bay, some twenty-five miles from Melbourne, did much to relieve strain for him in his later years.

He was a man of large frame (but insufficient flesh), and he must initially have had a very strong constitution, but he had a certain bronchial tendency (which had made him reluctant to accept a chair in England, as he might, with advantage in other ways, have done); and his persistent refusal to take sufficient rest had resulted in a very serious asthmatic condition—which, also, he treated with far too little respect, not allowing severe attacks to interrupt strenuous labours for more than the bare minimum duration of the physical prostration. This was all accentuated in the war years, when he was no longer young, when he seemed driven by daemonic energies, and could hardly give himself time to sleep.

He had reached the age of optional retirement in 1940; and, in 1943-1944, he went on a year’s final leave, after some disagreement with the governing body of the university about conditions he considered necessary for the prosecu­tion of his war work—which he continued throughout that year. (He was then a member of the Army Inventions Directorate.) It was just after his final retirement from active duties (of both kinds), in 1944, that he had his first very serious illness, after recovery from which he spent the quietest and most peaceful—and, perhaps, the happiest—period of his life, much of it in what had become their seaside home after leaving the university grounds.

But, towards the end of 1945, there began to arrive the long-delayed proofs of the tenth edition of ‘Kaye and Laby’; and that—owing to a variety of circum­stances, not here specially relevant—set him problems involving severe strain, which led to his final collapse in April 1946. (Fortunately, the revision of the proofs was, by that time, sufficiently far advanced to enable adequate completion by his collaborators—of whom his daughter, Jean, had to take too much of the burden—and the edition was due to appear at the end of 1947.)

Laby was in hospital for about three months, during which the present writer saw him at regular intervals until the peaceful end, near midnight on 21 June (‘his face illumined with the light of the truth he had sought and the service to his fellows which he had rendered’).12 For most of that time his mind was working on problems of one kind and another, but incapable of pursuing any train of thought for more than a few minutes (‘rigid and sclerosed arteries could no longer function to supply the physical basis of adjustment to life and thought’). In the absence of normal inhibitions there broke from him, again and again, striking expressions of his passion for truth and his enthusiasm for humanity.

Laby had not found life easy. His widowed mother’s hard struggle and his own battling for opportunity—often against obstacles and frustration which need not have been—had left their mark on him. This had two opposite effects.

12 This quotation, and the one below, from our friend, C. I. McLaren, M.D. (brother of the Adams Prizeman, the late Professor S. B. McLaren) who visited Laby almost daily and was with him at the end.

yc2 Obituary Noticesspecial sympathy and generosity towards those who had suffered like disabilities and a certain sharpness of resentment against obstruction or incompetence he was quick (sometimes too quick) to detect.

To those who knew him well he was a very lovable person. One of our most distinguished Round Table friends, the Hon. Mr Justice Nicholas, of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, wrote thus of him:13

‘If one were to particularize Laby’s outstanding qualities as a friend . . . they would be his integrity of mind, his humour and his enthusiasm. His humour was constant and universal. It kept him young and happy even when oppressed by ill-health. It saw him through many crises in his travels and in his academic work. His mental integrity made it impossible to discuss with him any topic without finding some obscurity removed or some new aspect disclosed. . . . He rejoiced in his family, both in the country and in the University Gardens; . . . Laby had the mind of one who winces at false work and loves the true. . . .’

Laby set down (in autobiographical notes) the motto: ‘Great is Truth; and it prevails’ (the twist of tense perhaps significant); and, as keynotes, Art in terms of Beauty, Science in terms of , Politics in terms of Morality. Perhaps significant also that this last was not the third member of the modern philosophical trinity: Religion in terms of Goodness. The Church of his generation—perhaps especially in the New World—had not captured the imagination of the men of science. But Laby was neither scoffer nor sceptic, as were so many of the intellectuals of the period; he had just never (he said) found time to think his way through to ultimate realities of the spirit. But he had, indeed, a passion for truth, and for freedom through truth; and an intense enthusiasm for the common good.

More and more he rejoiced in the grand old name, ‘Natural Philosophy’, for his school; and more and more the term ‘philosophical’ was on his lips, as expressing his conception, not only of his own science, but of all true university study and research—in the great root sense of ‘the love, study, or pursuit of wisdom, or of knowledge of things and their causes, whether theoretical or practical’ ( Oxford Dictionary).

A genuine nobility was the essential spirit of his life.D. K. P icken

PostscriptThe writer of this notice, not himself a physicist, was asked to write it because

of his intimate association with Laby, in two universities, over a very long period.14 He agreed only on the understanding that what he wrote would be supplemented by a physicist of standing, familiar with the detail of Laby’s

13 In an article in The Australian Quarterly of September 1946, which he did not sign because, he said, it owed so much to others.

14 Our common scientific interest was in the mathematical framework of physics. To a certain influence of this on the later editions of *Kaye and Laby* there is reference in the preface Laby wrote for the forthcoming tenth edition.

Thomas Howell Laby 753researches. The following tribute from Professor Oliphant, to ‘Laby’s place in physics’, makes a fitting conclusion to the notice.

‘Physical science in Australia owes more to Laby than to any other individual. His influence extended far beyond Melbourne. Throughout Australia, and in many other parts of the world, his high standards, his devotion to his subject and his great energy, affected profoundly the course of physical study and investigation. He was not a lone worker, but contributed his best through the students who worked with him, in this respect showing great similarity to Rutherford. He shared also with Rutherford a hesitant and somewhat uninspiring manner of lecturing; and yet, like Rutherford, he managed to inspire a remarkable number of young men and women to follow physics as a career. He persuaded his students that physics mattered, that it was a subject to which the best in a man could be devoted. It was this ability to inspire a love of physics in others, to engender a desire to emulate Laby’s own achievement, which is the prime factor determining his position in the world of physics. The continuity of this inspiration in Australasia makes of Laby a greater figure in the Southern Hemisphere than some great men of science like Bragg and Lamb whose sojourn in Australia was much shorter and whose influence was exerted before Australian science came of age.

‘Many scientific activities which are now major undertakings under C.S.I.R., the defence departments and the universities, were instituted in Laby’s laboratory: X-ray analysis, radiophysics, optics and precision measurement of all kinds, especially in heat. He fostered modern nuclear physics in Australia in its embryo stages. His own high standards, his passion for accuracy and his uncompromising attitude towards pretentious or slovenly work, raised the standard of physical observation in Australia to a very high level. As a result, the calibre of the work published from his laboratory was very high, and was in the forefront of advance in some fields. He fostered physical techniques, realizing that accurate observation was wholly dependent upon the command which his laboratory possessed over the laboratory arts. These techniques have spread throughout Australia, in science and in industry.

‘Outside Australasia, Laby will be remembered as much by the results of his general scientific activities in Melbourne as by his own researches. The steady stream of young men he sent to the Cavendish Laboratory to work with Rutherford has fed physics in Australia itself, in Great Britain, and in other parts of the English-speaking world, with many brilliant men. His students were invariably interested in the fundamentals of physics, and were accepted readily in laboratories where the frontiers of the subject were under investigation. Laby’s own interests were in experimental physics, but a surprisingly large proportion of those men have attained distinction in mathematical physics.

‘There is little doubt that Laby was the most distinguished physicist

754working south of the equator; that he built in Melbourne the finest and most influential school of physics in the Southern Hemisphere; and that he fostered in Australia an integrity and scientific tradition upon which the present high standard of Australian scientific work is founded.’

Obituary Notices

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1903. The separation of iron from nickel and cobalt. Proc. Roy. Soc. N .S .W . 37.1905. (With D. Mawson.) Radioactivity and occurrence of radium in Australian

minerals. Chem. News, 92 (from J . Proc. Roy. Soc. N .S .W . 38).1906. (With G. A. Carse.) Relation between velocity and volume of ions of organic

acids and bases. Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc. 13.1907. Total ionization of various gases by a-rays from uranium. Proc. Roy. Soc. 79.

• 1907. (With G. A. Carse.) Relation between velocity and volume of organic ions inaqueous solutions. Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc. 14.

1908. Landolt’s experiments on change of weight in chemical transformation. Chem.News, 97.

1908. Supersaturation and nuclear condensation of certain organic vapours. Phil. Trans. A , 208.

1908. A re-calculation of the vapour pressure of mercury. Phil. Mag. 16.1908. (With G. W. C. Kaye.) Gaseous ionization and pressure. Phil. Mag. 16.1909. A string electrometer. Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc. 15.1910. Tables of ionization constants and of radioactivity. Radium, Paris, 7.1911. (With P. W. Burbidge.) Nature of y-rays. Nature, 87.1912. The age of the earth. Nature, 88.1912. (With P. W. Burbidge.) Fluctuations in ionization by y-rays. Proc. Roy. Soc. A ,

86.1919. (With Natalie C. B. Allen.) Sensitiveness of photographic plates to X-rays.

Nature, 103 (abstract).1919. (With Natalie C. B. Allen.) Sensitiveness of photographic plates to X-rays.

Proc. Roy. Soc. Vic. 31.1919. (With E. O. Hercus.) Thermal conductivity of air. Proc. Roy. Soc. A , 95.1920. (With J. K. Roberts.) New method of determining the mechanical equivalent

of heat. Proc. Roy. Soc. Vic. 32.1923. Mechanical equivalent of heat. Nature, 111.1924. A standard barometer of new design. J. Sci. Instr. 1.1926. Critical discussion of the determination of the mechanical equivalent of heat.

Proc. Phys. Soc. 38.1926. (With J. Aberdeen.) Conduction of heat through powders and its dependence

on the pressure and conductivity of the gaseous phase. Proc. Roy. Soc. A , 113.1927. (With E. O. Hercus.) The thermal conductivity of gases. Phil. Mag. 3.1927. (With E. O. H ercus.) Mechanical equivalent of heat. Phil. Trans. A , 227.1928. (With W. G. Kannuluik.) Thermal and electrical conductivities of a copper

crystal at various temperatures. Proc. Roy. Soc. A , 121’.1929. (With C. E. Eddy and A. W. T urner.) Analysis by X-ray spectroscopy. Proc.

Roy. Soc. A , 124.1930. Atomic analysis by X-ray spectroscopy. Trans. Faraday Soc. 26.1930. (With C. E. Eddy.) Quantitative analysis by X-ray spectroscopy. Proc. Roy.

Soc. A , 127.1931. (With R. T . W. Bingham.) Reflection and diffraction of X-rays. Proc. Roy. Soc.

A 133.

Thomas Howell Laby 7551931. (With C. E. Eddy.) Quantitative analysis of alloys by X-ray spectroscopy. J .

Phys. Chem. 35.1932. (With C. E. Eddy.) Sensitivity of atomic analysis by X-rays. Proc. Roy. Soc.

135.1935. (With L. H. M artin and J. C. Bower.) Auger effect in argon. Proc. Roy. Soc. A ,

148.1935. (With E. O. H ercus.) Effect of aeration of water used in the determination of the

mechanical equivalent of heat. Proc. Phys. Soc. 47.1940. (With J. J. M cNeil, F. G. N icholls and A. B. F. N ickson.) Wave form, energy

and reflection by the ionosphere, of atmospherics. Proc. Roy. Soc. , 174.1941. (With V. D. H opper.) The electronic charge. Proc. Roy. Soc. A , 178.1942. Measurement of electronic charge. Nature, 150.1942. (With V. D. H opper.) Thermostats employing external surface control. Proc.

Phys. Soc. 54.

Books and Pamphlets

1911. (Co-editor) University reform in New Zealand. Whitcombe & Tombs, N.Z. 1911. (With G. W. C. K aye.) Tables of physical and chemical constants and some mathe­

matical functions. Longmans, Green. (Second edition, 1916; third, 1918; fourth, 1920; fifth, 1926; sixth, 1928; seventh, 1932; eighth, 1936; ninth, 1941; tenth, in the press.)

1931. (Co-editor with A. B. Broughton Edge.) The principles and practice of geographical prospecting. (Report of the Imperial Geographical Experimental Survey.) Cambridge.

1921. (With E. O. H ercus.) Pamphlet on Physics for medical students (supplementary text); afterwards (in 1933) expanded into a book by J. S. Rogers (edited by T . H. L.). Melbourne and Oxford.

1944. Pamphlet on Lord Rutherford. Whitcombe & Tombs.