鈥淗ere鈥檚 a bit of fun!鈥澛� the editor would say, lighting his pipe for the hundredth time that day and grinning about the fact that for the moment at least he knew all about the crawling habits of the periwinkles at Whitstable.

For me all reminiscence of the first ten years of New 杏吧原创 begins and ends with the first editor, Percy Cudlipp. One evening in the summer of 1956 I sat on the edge of too deep a chair in the Waldorf Hotel, the scruffy manuscripts of the aspirant writer in hand, while Cudlipp explained the scheme for a plain-language weekly magazine of science. What he or I said over the whisky that evening is long since forgotten, but after the first few minutes Cudlipp鈥檚 hopes, standards, demands became mine. From the vantage point of a very junior writing post I was to watch with fascination as he and his scientific editor, Tom Margerison, turned a rather vague idea for a magazine into what must surely be counted one of the least vague publications in the world.

That Percy Cudlipp knew nothing about science was only one of the odd things about the project. He had been editor of the London Evening Standard at 29, and for many years after editor of the Daily Herald. But New 杏吧原创 became for him in retrospect his greatest pride, the most exciting undertaking of a busy career. And in the process he not only put his journalistic skill and resourcefulness to their severest test, he also discovered an academic streak in himself that made him quick in spotting the merits and possible snags in scientific stories, and hypersensitive to the nuances and etiquette of the world of learning.

The original idea for the magazine came to Maxwell Raison upon reading a press report of a speech in which Sir Winston Churchill pointed out the importance of science and technology to the future of Britain, Raison knew all about starting magazines, with experience of Picture Post, Farmers鈥� Weekly and other successes behind him. When he canvassed his idea among the leading scientists, industrialists and educationalists, he met with a generally enthusiastic response.

He joined forces with Nicholas Harrison, a blunt, cheerful man experienced in finance, who became the chairman of the new company. They secured what seemed to be sufficient capital for the job and began recruiting staff.

In September, 1956, I first entered the little office building, in a quiet alley leading into Gray鈥檚 Inn, that was to be my place of work for ten years. The launching date had been fixed for 22 November. The auspices were not good. London was in the turmoil of the Suez crisis; business was entering a mild depression, and the advertising revenue on which the embryo would depend post-natally was going to be very difficult to secure. But for those of us on the editorial floor such strategic problems seemed remote from the exciting and exacting work of inventing a magazine. Such a task is like nothing so much as trying to draw a picture in the dark. No one, not even the editor, could know exactly what it would be like, until the first copies came off the presses. Meanwhile, we were all groping for the right features, the right subjects, the right style. Then, as now, the staff was a mixture of journalists turned to science and scientist turned to journalism. We threw up ideas and threw them out; we wrote and we scrapped. We fretted until the actual publication was almost an anti-climax in the office.

The first issue was the only one we produced with time to spare. The inexorable discipline of weekly publication hit us with full force as the presses turned for the first time; next week we had to do it again. And so on ad infinitum. The weekly journalist has more time to think than his daily colleagues, yet more scope and timeliness than the staff of a monthly; as a result however, the pace is breathless. That, combined with the special care and exactitude required in a publication that had to command respect among scientists; made the work fearsome.

Thus we found that we were doing, qualitatively and quantitatively, a different job from, say, that of the monthly Scientific American. Still less were we like Nature, serving up weekly portions of learned literature. It was with the long tradition of British weekly journalism 鈥� Spectator, Economist, New Statesman 鈥� that we sought to identify ourselves. Indeed, when people ask me why New 杏吧原创 has so far had no successful imitator in any country, that is my answer: our magazine was a peculiarly British phenomenon. By American standards of large specialized staffs and extensive homogenizing of the words, the job would be nearly impossible and almost certainly uneconomic.

Even in Britain, it was touch and go. Sales of New 杏吧原创 were good from the outset but anxiety about the viability of the new publication grew as the weeks passed, and the advertisements looked sparse. By the summer of 1957 things were critical; there was no more money in the bank. But the backers raised their stake, and those who so demonstrated their faith in the new magazine have since had every reason to congratulate themselves on their acumen. Two very different events helped to set the tide running in our favour. The first was the launching of Sputnik-1. By astonishing the Western world into a new appreciation of what Churchill called 鈥� 鈥渢he empires of the mind鈥澛�, the Russians unwittingly did rival nations a great service; and incidentally New 杏吧原创 benefited greatly. A few weeks later, the Duke of Edinburgh wrote a message on the first anniversary. That was a rare honour. In the course of it, His Royal Highness remarked: 鈥�The New 杏吧原创 could not have been born at a better moment in our history and I am certain it will live to perform a great service鈥�.

It was reassuring that someone was certain! Anyway, we broke even in the second year, and after that never looked back.

On the other hand the chief source of editorial anxiety had quickly vanished. Contrary to the cheerless forecast, it proved by no means difficult to persuade scientists to write for New 杏吧原创. At first they were motivated by an altruistic desire to help a magazine that they regarded as a 鈥済ood thing鈥�; later, self-interest came in, when they found the New 杏吧原创, with its large and important readership, was an excellent vehicle for the informal exposition of their work and ideas. Nor were scientists nearly as illiterate as was generally supposed. A lot of heavy editing and re-writing had to be done in the early days, but that was largely because the authors were not familiar with the magazine. When alterations are proposed, the author has always had the last word, so that a touch of drama comes very often on press day, when feverish telephone calls have to seek out authors in Italy or California, in order to obtain their final approval for the finishing touches on urgent articles.

With a little foresight and judgment, apparent coups proved relatively easy to achieve. Many readers thought we were in the confidence of the Soviet government when we went to press with an article, 鈥淲hy put men into space?鈥�, The trick was simple: the flight was generally believed to be imminent but in any case the article was so conceived that it could have stood on its merits even if nothing had happened. But sometimes we surprise ourselves, as articles that seemed almost timeless became 鈥渉ot鈥� overnight.

This article was originally published in New 杏吧原创 on 24 November 1966

50 Years of New 杏吧原创: The Best Articles 鈥� find many more in our exclusive Special Report. You can also have your say on what you think was the biggest scientific advance of the last 50 years, in our

WHEN Bill Clinton gives Tony Blair a special hug and Royal Navy submarines
hoist their American Trident missiles aboard, they do so because of a
transatlantic alliance forged between 1943 and 1946 by Jimmy Chadwick. His
discovery of the neutron, at Cambridge in 1932, led directly to the liberation
of energy from heavy elements, and he went on to help devise both the American
and the British fission bombs. His homeland then forgot him. Until this
excellent book by Andrew Brown, he has remained the most shadowy of the atomic
scientists who, for better or worse, gave the human species mastery over nuclear
energy.

The bulky figure of Ernest Rutherford casts the largest shadow across
Chadwick鈥檚 face. For almost his entire reign at Cambridge鈥檚 Cavendish
Laboratory, the discoverer of the atomic nucleus had Chadwick as his lieutenant,
setting the agenda for a string of Nobel prizes. As a genius assisting a
super-genius, Chadwick鈥檚 position was akin to that of Isaac Newton鈥檚 sidekick
Edmond Halley. While Newton was grim and neurotic, Halley was rumbustious enough
to look after himself. But between Rutherford and Chadwick the temperaments were
reversed; it was the lieutenant who was dour.

In a thorough and sympathetic treatment of a personality more abstruse than
his physics, Brown sums up Chadwick as one of life鈥檚 bank managers. Behind the
prim mask was a kindly and witty person who enjoyed fishing, cowboy movies and
his ever-present pipe. But Chadwick was deeply unhappy, at least until he
married. For reasons too dark for him to reveal, Chadwick hated his father, a
failed laundry proprietor in Manchester.

He became a physicist by attending the wrong interview at the University of
Manchester and being too shy to explain his mistake. Rutherford was an inspiring
teacher, and picked Chadwick as the only physicist invited to accompany him when
he moved from Manchester to Cambridge in 1919. In gloomy Jimmy he had found a
superb talent for research, at once opportunistic and rigorous. To adapt
Chadwick鈥檚 metaphor, Rutherford鈥檚 mind was a battleship鈥檚 bow, while his was the
razor.

Rutherford speculated about the existence of a neutral proton and Chadwick
started to search for the neutron in any wildly absurd way he could devise. He
cadged disused but powerful alpha-emitters from an American cancer hospital,
while strange results from experiments in Germany prompted him to set a student
bombarding beryllium. The student reported the creation of forward-going
radiation more penetrating than the radiation that came backwards鈥攁nd
Chadwick realised they had found the neutron. French physicists could have got
there first had they not mistakenly thought they were seeing super-energetic
gamma rays. Chadwick worked around the clock for three weeks to prove the
neutron鈥檚 existence. He found that the radiation generated by alpha particles
hitting beryllium could eject particles from a whole catalogue of elements, and
he set out his case in a brief and lucid letter to Nature.

Even collecting the 1935 Nobel physics prize was an ordeal for so shy a man.
Chadwick fumbled the award when the King of Sweden handed it to him and a
bystander had to recover the cheque from the stage. Nevertheless, the cash prize
was to help to pay for a cyclotron.

Chadwick had deserted Rutherford that year because his hero had refused to
buy the Cavendish the novel kind of particle accelerator that would replace
radioactive sources in nuclear experiments. Then, as now, researchers working on
fundamental science were accused of pursuing useless knowledge and Rutherford
thought a cyclotron was too expensive. So Chadwick became professor of physics
in his wife鈥檚 home city of Liverpool, with plans to build a cyclotron in the
university basement. When Rutherford died unexpectedly in 1937, Lawrence Bragg
became director of the Cavendish, although Rutherford had always regarded
Chadwick as his heir-apparent. Chadwick said he was relieved not to have to
leave Liverpool鈥攁lthough he also said he would have liked to have been
asked.

Nuclear physics ceased to be a tranquil inquiry into the nature of the atom
when chemists in Berlin bombarded uranium with neutrons and made barium.
Physicists in Copenhagen interpreted this as uranium fission accompanied by a
large release of energy. By June 1940, Chadwick was coordinating research in
several universities to see whether a weapon was practicable.

A year later, on behalf of the committee code-named Maud, he set out in his
limpid prose the likely mass and explosive power of a uranium-235 bomb and
explained how to manufacture it. Because the British bomb-making project became
bogged down in petty academic jealousies, it was in the US that the Maud Report
made its impact. There a secret conclave of the National Academy of Sciences
accepted Chadwick鈥檚 verdict that an atom bomb was feasible.

Brigadier-General Leslie Groves was put in charge of making America鈥檚 bomb a
reality鈥攁nd his instinct was to exclude foreigners. For Britain to emerge
from the war as a strong contender in nuclear affairs, everything depended on
winning the confidence of the dictatorial Groves. Chadwick astonishingly, became
Groves鈥檚 right-hand man and British appointees found themselves at the cutting
edge of the work on both the uranium and plutonium bombs. As a result, the
postwar British government could confidently order an atomic weapons programme,
under Chadwick鈥檚 prot茅g茅, Bill Penney.

Brown explains how gloomy Jimmy pulled off this feat. He first enchanted the
top American physicists by daring to argue with the general, and then made
Groves chortle by thrashing the whiz kid Robert Oppenheimer in a highly
technical argument. Groves saw that this plain-dealing and universally respected
physicist was just the man to be his viceroy among the scientists.

From the standpoint of 1990s political correctness, Chadwick could be painted
as a Dr Strangelove. But this would be anachronistic and silly. The race to
build the atom bomb was happening during one of the grimmest wars in history and
its terrifying aftermath. Chadwick鈥檚 friend Joe Rotblat had to labour for half a
century before he won the Nobel peace prize. In Chadwick鈥檚 estimation, the early
nuclear weapons were no worse than mass bombing.

By the time he returned home from the US in 1946 as Sir James Chadwick, he
was just 54. Too many years of seven-day working weeks, punctuated only by
illness, had burnt him out, both as a physicist and as a public figure. He found
sanctuary as Master of Caius College, Cambridge, but he never visited the
Cavendish and the lifelong shyness became pathological. He would even take to
his bed to avoid an awkward meeting. Only one project fanned Chadwick鈥檚 embers.
His last great service was to ensure a major role for Britain in CERN, the
European Laboratory for Particle Physics created in 1952.

All mute inglorious Chadwicks can take comfort from his triumphs in physics
and diplomacy. While hearty people seem to dominate our ostentatious world, the
biggest changes may be worked by the quietest individuals. In one vignette in
Brown鈥檚 book, a research student in the Cavendish recalls Chadwick鈥檚 power of
concentration: 鈥淥ften when I went into his room to ask a question or to discuss
some matter he would completely ignore me, continuing at his little table doing
a calculation or writing some notes. After five, ten or even fifteen minutes I
would depart and there would still be no recognition that I had been in the
谤辞辞尘.鈥�