Utopia on the sidewalk

P D Smith

For a time, in the summer of 1933, the scientist who invented the first weapon of mass destruction – poison gas – was staying in the same genteel Georgian square in London’s Bloomsbury as the man who would play a key role in the creation of the atomic bomb.

Fritz Haber was a broken man. He was suffering from chronic angina and had been forced out of the research institute to which he had devoted his entire life. For a proud man, it was a deeply humiliating experience. To friends, the 64-year-old German chemist admitted feeling profoundly bitter. Einstein, who had just renounced his German citizenship, wrote him a pointed letter saying he was pleased to hear that “your former love for the blond beast has cooled off a bit”. Haber had only months to live. Exiled by the country he had tried to save during World War I with his chemical superweapon, he spent his last days wandering through Europe.

In July 1933 he visited London, staying at a hotel on Russell Square in Bloomsbury while he explored the possibility of working in England. He met Frederick G. Donnan, a tall and rather dashing professor of chemistry at nearby University College London, who sported a black eyepatch. During World War I, Donnan had worked on the production of mustard gas. Now he was attempting to arrange a fellowship for Germany’s leading chemical warfare expert.

That summer, another scientist who had fled Hitler’s Germany was also living in Russell Square. Leo Szilard, a Hungarian physicist who had been working in Berlin for the past decade, had brought his two suitcases to the Imperial Hotel in April. It was less costly than Haber’s hotel, the Russell, but for the scientist who had once declared that “there is no place as good to think as a bathtub”, what made the hotel irresistible were its famous Turkish baths.

Both hotels overlooked the elegant gardens of Russell Square, designed in the previous century by Britain’s foremost landscape designer, Humphry Repton. The British Museum and Library, University College London, and the London School of Economics were all within a fifteen-minute walk. T. S. Eliot (the “Pope of Russell Square”) worked in his garret office at number 24 for the publisher Faber & Faber, and in nearby Gordon Square was the fine Georgian townhouse where Virginia Woolf had once lived.

Szilard was essentially running the Academic Assistance Council (later the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning), an organisation he had helped found which dedicated itself to helping academics fleeing from the Nazis. His work for the AAC was unpaid. Szilard was living off earnings from patents which he held jointly with his close friend Albert Einstein. At the end of the 1920s, two of the greatest minds on the planet had applied their combined brain power to the problem of designing a safe refrigerator. Unfortunately, no one ever kept their groceries cool in an Einstein-Szilard fridge. But their invention of a liquid metal refrigeration system was later used to cool nuclear reactors.

Politically, the nationalist Haber and the socialist Szilard had little in common. However, unlike scientific purists such as Ernest Rutherford, for whom knowledge was its own reward, both men were enthralled by the idea of science as power. Neither Szilard nor Haber had set out in their careers intending to create new weapons. But both scientists played key roles in developing a new generation of scientific superweapons. Haber thought that chemical weapons would make him the saviour of his country. Szilard, an internationalist fired by an idealistic vision of how science should transform human life and society for the better, wanted to save the world with atomic energy and create Utopia.

What might these two refugee scientists have said to each other if they had met while walking through the neatly manicured gardens of Russell Square, just outside their hotels? Fritz Haber was at the end of his career, disowned by his country and thrown out of the institute he had founded by the Nazis. He was at the end of his life. Haber was a shadow of the dynamic man he had once been. Every few steps, he had to pause and catch his breath. By contrast, Leo Szilard, the budding nuclear physicist, was 35 years old, his figure still slim and youthful. He would have been striding past through the square, perhaps on his way to see his and Haber’s mutual friend, Professor Donnan at UCL.

Throughout 1933, Szilard worked tirelessly and selflessly on behalf of his fellow refugee academics. His daily routine at the Imperial Hotel began with breakfast in the plush restaurant, followed by a leisurely and extended soak in a bath – the only luxury the decidedly non-materialistic Szilard permitted himself. It was not uncommon for him to spend three hours in a tub, awaiting Archimedean inspiration. However, it was not in the bath that Leo Szilard had his Eureka! moment in 1933, but on Southampton Row, one of the main roads running into Russell Square.

Late on the morning of September 12, 1933, Szilard was reading The Times in the foyer of the Imperial Hotel. An article reported Ernest Rutherford’s speech on how subatomic particles might be used to transmute atoms. Rutherford was quoted as saying “anyone who looked for a source of power in the transformation of the atoms was talking moonshine”. Leo Szilard frowned as he read these words. Moonshine! If there was one thing in science that made Szilard really angry, it was experts who said that something was impossible.

Szilard always thought best on his feet. So he went for a walk. Many years later in America, Szilard would recall this moment, as he walked through Bloomsbury, pondering subatomic physics and Rutherford’s comments. “I remember,” said Szilard, “that I stopped for a red light at the intersection of Southampton Row.” The London traffic streamed by, but he scarcely noticed the vehicles. Instead, in his mind he saw streams of subatomic particles bombarding atoms.

As the traffic lights changed and the cars stopped, the physicist stepped out in front of the impatient traffic. A keen-eyed London cabby, watching Szilard cross, might have noticed him pause for a moment in the middle of the road. Szilard may even have briefly raised his hand to his forehead, as if to catch hold of the beautiful but terrible thought that had just crossed his mind. For at that moment Leo Szilard saw how to release the energy locked up in the heart of every atom, a self-sustaining chain reaction created by neutrons:

“As I was waiting for the light to change and as the light changed to green and I crossed the street, it suddenly occurred to me that if we could find an element which is split by neutrons and which would emit two neutrons when it absorbed one neutron, such an element, if assembled in sufficiently large mass, could sustain a nuclear chain reaction… In certain circumstances it might become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction, liberate energy on an industrial scale, and construct atomic bombs. The thought that this might be in fact possible became a sort of obsession with me.”

I know Russell Square well. It’s one of my favourite parts of London. I often walked through it on my way to classes, first as a graduate student, then while lecturing at UCL. Two hundred years after its paths were first laid and its trees planted, the gardens have now been restored to their former glory. It is a leafy haven of peace amidst the noise of the metropolis.

While researching Doomsday Men, which tells the story of Szilard and Haber, I often worked at the University of London Library in the impressive art deco Senate House which overlooks Russell Square. Its foundation stone was laid in June 1933 and during the war George Orwell worked here in the Ministry of Information, an experience that provided the model for his fictional “Ministry of Truth” in 1984. On the way to the library each morning, I walked through the square and was often struck by the thought that Szilard and Haber had passed under these very trees seventy years earlier. Indeed, a stone’s throw from here Szilard realised how to release the energy of the atom. In a sense, the road to Hiroshima’s destruction begins here in this elegant Georgian square.

Strangely enough, a literary scientist also discovered the secret of releasing the atom’s energy while working in this part of London. In H. G. Wells’s The World Set Free (1914), the scientist Holsten succeeds in “tapping the internal energy of atoms” by setting up “atomic disintegration in a minute particle of bismuth”. This explosive reaction, in which the scientist is slightly injured, produces radioactive gas and gold as a by-product. The quest of the alchemists is over – gold can now be created on demand. But Holsten has also discovered something far more valuable than even gold: “from the moment when the invisible speck of bismuth flashed into riving and rending energy, Holsten knew that he had opened a way for mankind, however narrow and dark it might still be, to worlds of limitless power”. When Holsten realises the implications of what he has found, his mind is thrown into turmoil. Like Szilard, he goes for a walk to think things through.

What is astonishing is that Holsten makes his discovery in Bloomsbury in 1933, the very year in which Szilard walked down Southampton Row and had his Eureka moment. The significance of this coincidence in time and space was not lost on Leo Szilard. Indeed, the similarities between the two scientists are striking. Both the fictional and the real scientist were born at the beginning of the atomic age, Holsten in the year X-rays were discovered, 1895, and Szilard in the year radium was discovered, 1898. Szilard had read Wells’s novel in 1932. It is clear that he regarded it as prophetic, and frequently referred to it in relation to key moments in both his life and the discovery of atomic energy. He shared Holsten’s dreams and his nightmares.

My knowledge of these historical moments has given this genteel London square a special resonance for me. I’ve often sat on the grass while taking time out from research and wondered what other meetings or Eureka moments have occurred in this green urban space. The square has gained a whole new dimension for me. It is not just a few trees and flower beds surrounded by some over-priced townhouses. It has a history, its own unique time-scape, one charged with global significance. A scene in a great scientific tragedy unfolded on this urban stage. And who knows how many minor domestic dramas have also been acted out in the shade of its trees. I became so fascinated by the secret histories of urban spaces like Russell Square that I even wrote a book proposal on the subject.

I was powerfully reminded of these themes recently when reading The Spaces of the Modern City: Imaginaries, Politics, and Everyday Life, edited by Gyan Prakash and Kevin Kruse (Princeton 2008). This is an excellent collection of essays by scholars who are united in the view that cities are not inert containers for social, political and economic processes, but historically produced spaces that shape, and are shaped by, power, economy, culture, and society. They want to replace Rem Koolhaas’s post-modern notion of a Generic City “free from history”, by investing urban spaces with a new sense of place and history, within a context of global change.

As Gyan Prakash rightly says, cities “are the principal landscapes of modernity”. Streets and sidewalks, parks and squares, tube trains and buses – these are the everyday settings for “dynamic encounters and experiences”. Despite globalization, our urban experiences still depend on “local lifeworlds”, rich with memories and imagination. The Spaces of the Modern City is a fascinating attempt to map the poetics of the urban everyday – from the liminal spaces of racially mixed neighbourhoods in London of the 1950s, the Situationists in West Berlin during the 60s, to Tokyo’s extraordinary Street Science Observation Society in the 1980s.

In 2008, Homo sapiens became an urban species. This year, for the first time in the history of the planet, more than half the population – 3.3 billion people – are city dwellers. Two hundred years ago only 3 per cent of the world’s population lived in cities, a figure that had remained fairly stable (give or take the occasional plague) for the last thousand years.

The experience of living in cities is universal. It crosses continents, cultures and even time. Urbanism is not a western phenomenon. The ideal of the global village was first glimpsed in cities seven thousand years ago, in today’s Iraq. As one historian has written: “A town is always a town, wherever it is located, in time as well as space.”

I believe cities are our greatest creation as a species. They embody our unique ability to imagine how the world might be, and to realise those dreams in brick, steel, concrete and glass. For our species has never been satisfied with what Nature gave us. We are the ape that builds, that shapes our environment. We are the city builders – Homo urbanus.

Undoubtedly, urban planners face some daunting challenges in the coming years. About a billion city dwellers are homeless or living in squatter towns without adequate access to clean water. That’s a sixth of the planet’s entire population. Indeed, until recently more people died in cities than were born in them. Thomas Malthus, in his Essay on the Principles of Population (1803), said that half of all children born in Manchester and Birmingham died before the age of three.

Problems remain, but cities are more popular than ever. By 2030, sixty percent of people will be urbanites. Across the world from Shanghai to São Paulo, people are flocking to the cities – to buy and sell, to find work, to meet lovers and like-minded people, to be where it’s all happening. For like magnets, cities have always attracted creative people from both the arts and the sciences.

So next time you’re strolling down the street and you notice some guy who is lost in thought, don’t forget – he could be the next Leo Szilard, chasing visions of scientific Utopia on a dusty urban sidewalk.

Comments

[CCBC]

This essay had such an exciting beginning, then declined into nonsense. But such is the way with essays, I suppose. Perhaps if M.Smith had identified his primary subject when he began..?

[Abbas Raza]

I found this a lovely musing. Why should an essay have a primary subject at all? Peter has given us fascinating nuggets of history and a meditation on urban spaces, connected by an autobiographical thread.

I really enjoyed it. Thank you, Peter.

[Dave Ranning]

Haber did more than just invent poison gas. The "Haber Process" was the first major industrial method of producing fertilizer, and made possible the production of nitrogen from natural gas. This started the move toward industrial agriculture and spurred this overpopulation we are now dealing with, as our systems strain under catabolic collapse.

[Ruchira]

That's a pretty amazing statement, Dave.

The original use of Haber's Process, which was designed for the easy manufacture of explosives by making possible the direct synthesis of ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen can in all fairness be compared in its destructive value to Fritz Haber's support of war efforts and poison gas. But you picked on its peaceful use - the manufacture of artificial fertilizer. Improved agricultural methods may indeed have contributed to population growth. But then so did penicillin, childhood vaccinations, improved pre and neo-natal care and mass production of pharmaceuticals and consumer goods. Is that a plus or a minus for humanity and the world? We can have a debate on whether population increase due to better health and lower mortality is desirable at all. If it is not, why oppose warfare and poison gas in the same breath?

I don't understand your discomfort with improved agriculture. Until we are willing ourselves to eschew the advantages of scientific and technological advancements for our own well being, it seems churlish to complain that others (usually the unwashed masses in far off countries) may be benefiting from them by eating better, living longer and causing us to worry about a crowded earth.

[Elatia Harris]

No chemist, I was imprecisely aware of Fritz Haber and his contributions to the world until today -- thanks, Peter and everyone else.

Re: Russell Square & Archimedes, it would be interesting, historically, to compare all the scientific epiphanies that occurred to the ambulatory with those occurring to the tubbed. Writing in 1961, in _The City in History_, Lewis Mumford remarked that the most reliable test of the livability
of a city was the number of places there were where a person could sit down without having to buy anything. One naturally thinks of parks, but public baths might do quite well.

[Dave Ranning]

Ruchria-
In no way am I defending Haber, someone of questionable values when it comes to the results of actions.
I am just pointing out that Haber invented a process that made possible a vastly increased population on Earth, and his other "achievements" pale when compared to the consequence of this, and the coming conditions that are arising because of the collapse of industrial agriculture (if you question this analysis, you are not paying attention).
Norman Borlaug and Haber are two of the most influential people of the 20th century, but few know who they are.

[Ruchira]

Dave,

I still don't understand your point. Forget poison gas, cheap explosives and Haber's moral character. Do you or do you not agree that the synthesis of ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen resulting in the mass manufacture of fertilizer and Norman Borlaug's research were "good" on balance, the resulting population increase notwithstanding?

And yes, I agree that both of them should count among the two most influential "unknown" people of the 20th century. Borlaug, not surprisingly, is better known in India where he was instrumental in ushering in the "Green Revolution," than he is in the US.

[Dave Ranning]

R--
Good or bad? History will tell, and it is not looking good, from a macro point of view. I'm sure the increased yields led to the benefit of several billion people, and was a major factor to the end of 100 million years of evolution and the crash of huge amounts of species and bio diversity.
Even the KT extinction will probably looked as a diminished even as compared to the present extinction event.
I'm just not that anthropocentric in my analysis.

[Ruchira]

I'm just not that anthropocentric in my analysis.

Fair enough. If that's your point of view, then I presume that you are also opposed to the other developments I mentioned, penicillin and vaccinations included. Although I myself believe that bettering the lot of man does not necessarily have to amount to callous anthropocentrism.

According to the argument you forward, hasn't man been bucking evolutionary trends ever since he learnt to self-medicate and designed co-operative food production and division of labor?

I am not lumping you with conservative creationists. I do not know your politics or your philosophy. You may be on the exact opposite side of this debate - an extreme nature lover. But I did hear one right winger once ask: "If liberals believe in evolution, why do they clamor for universal health care?" Are you asking the same question?

[Michael Mason]

There's a wonderful book on the horizon called The Alchemy of Air by Thomas Hager--I recently had a chance to review it for Discover magazine. It's about both Haber and Bosch and their respective roles in developing the experiments that ultimately yielded nitrogen. The book does a wonderful job at looking at the issues from all sides. Highly recommended.

[Dave Ranning]

R-
I practice equanimity in my analysis.
(as best I can, considering my family, economic status, society I live in, and the geographic and political boundaries that condition my thinking).
Antibiotics and vaccinations are embedded in the sensual world we inhabit.
Extinction is also a embedded reality (99% of all species that have arisen are extinct).
Haber has quickened the conditions for homo sapiens extinction, it would seem from the crisis we are in.
Are you paying attention to the world that you inhabit?
It would seem that narrative and story , along with heuristic thinking dominate you view.

[William Lanouette]

Had they met in Russell Square Fritz Haber and Leo Szilard would have known one another: in Berlin in the 1920s Haber was on the review committee for Szilard's Ph.D.

[PD Smith]

... and anyone looking for a biography of Leo Szilard should certainly read William Lanouette's excellent "Genius in the Shadows"!

[Abbas Raza]

Ruchira,

I almost left a comment with thoughts completely identical to yours yesterday, but then didn't have time. Are you channeling me (or I you)?

[Hugo]

I share the same taste for urban enviroments as you.
Quite a nice read, thanks.

[Ruchira]

Abbas,

We are channeling each other through our shared perspective of growing up in "developing" countries.

[Carlos]

Dave, can you clarify exactly how our success is going to result in our extinction? That word means something specific.

I'd hate to accuse you of allowing direst narrative, story, or Heuristic Thinking to color your world view.

[AJ]

Not to defend Dan too much here...because I am not totally on board with what he is saying...but to say that introducing nitrates at industrial levels into our water tables, downstream wetlands, and reparian forests is a good thing is probably not something I would side with. Developing countries aside, if it is not one thing, it is another....it is best to remain agnostic with these kinds of things.

Otherwise progress is GREAT!

[AJ]

I meant Dave.
Sorry.

[Dave Ranning]

AJ-
I as going to also bring up the ecological damage of industrial agriculture's use of nitrates, but it pales as to the effect of increased food production, and the population explosion and resulting overshoot of earths carrying capacity, species extinction, and catabolic collapse currently unfolding.
This just isn't about petrol prices my cornucopian friends, sit back and watch this one-- It will be more interesting than American Idol!

[stefany]

PD, I am going to read all the books you suggested :) Thanks for this!

[Ramesh Raghuvanshi]

Experiences of western cities may be pardise like, but we Indian who are living big cities experiences of hell.AllIndian cities are dirty, no footpath for walk, too much slum,crime voliance. Industralization is curse to us.
Western countries increasing more shipting all durty and labour some manufacturing work in India, increasing cyber coolies and making cities of India lopsided hell.

[Carlos]

Well I sympathize Ramesh.

Even as I look back to what a (relative) cesspool New York City was just a few decades ago, I realize that your cities have far greater current problems than mine had back then (though it was a more exciting, colorful place back in those days...to me). But if you look further back at what NY was like 100 years ago and more, the problems it had to deal with were the same, and they had to deal with it without any energy source other than horses, wood and coal.

There is a frothy little history of NYC called The Big Oyster, detailing the decline into putridness of the city from its former place as the largest supplier of oysters to the world. Oysters being a bellweather of ecological sustainability. It's a grim read of open sewers and cholera, but here just a short time later the harbor is nearly clean and the marine life is returning even as the Human population climbs.

It takes time, organization, and popular will to build the infrastructure to enable people to live with each other safely. My desi friends tell me constant stories of how bribery rules the day in local law enforcement, as it did once in New York. It might be easier to just grin and pay, glad the price is not more, but it stands to reason that higher level bribes allow too much not to get done to improve the infrastructure. Fix the corruption and people who need to make money will turn to honest effort, from landlords to sanitation workers. How to fix the corruption? I hear Guliani is looking for work :-)

[David Thorpe]

Thank you for another thought provoking article, Peter. A couple of side points: the Russell Square hotel was the first place I ever stayed in London, and many years later I used to teach scriptwriting across the road in the University.

You evidently like graphic images of cities. If you are not aware of it already, you might like to check out the several astonishing books in the series Les Cités Obscures by Francois Schuiten - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Cit%C3%A9s_Obscures

[PD Smith]

Thanks David - Les Cités Obscures sounds great; I must check that out...!

And thanks too for all these other comments - very interesting indeed. Good to know that some of you at least got something out of the piece, even if it was just a good argument!

[Pete Chapman]

It's too bad that your book proposal remained just that. I like the way you think about cities. You have the makings of a good book there if this article is any indication of the avenues you like to wander down.
The "World Set Free"/Szilard confluence is a good one, it makes me think of great cities as being coincidence generators.
If you're interested in the Situationists you may want to, you haven't already, take a look at "Lipstick Traces" by Greil Marcus which outlines the influence of the Situationists on the English punk rock movement. It's guilty of massive over-reaching in the kind of connections it makes but Marcus really culled some of the better parts of the Situationist critique of urban life. If you don't take the book seriously it's great fun.
Now, about this Szilard/Einstein refrigerator; that's really interesting. What are best sources on that one?

[PD Smith]

Thanks Pete - glad you liked the urban theme. I'm still hoping to convince a publisher to go with the idea... Yes, I love the idea of cities and coincidences too.

Cheers for the book tip - I'll check it out!

On the Szilard-Einstein fridge: there's a section in my own book, Doomsday Men, on this. But you could also look at Gene Dannen's article in Scientific American (Jan 1997). Let me know if you want any more refs...

[aguy109]

Ref to Harber and agriculture: it was agriculture that made cities possible in the first place, by supplying storable grain and other supplies in large quantities. Cities "nodify" people and force them together so that they meet, as against small towns, suburbs and rural areas that allow us to isolate ourselves. Cities confront us with Time, the statements and legacies of generations long gone...(insert endless string of true cliches) ....
I grew up in London and used to travel by Tube to Russell Square every morning, then walk to my job in a laboratory in Lincoln's Inn. Thanks for a great post.

[Dave Ranning]

The question comes down tho this:
"Are humans smarter than yeast?"
(a quote from Bob Shaw, a fellow bloger on another site).
Nitrogen production from natural gas increased humans knowledge and ability to adjust to environmental changes.
But will we over run our resources and crash, as do yeast on regular basis?

[lisa lebowski]

As I recall, Haber's wife, who was also a chemist, killed herself when she learned what her husband had done...