IT'S ELEMENTAL! a way then the problems for atomic power were going to be enormous. These thoughts weighed heavily on Soddy, who was thankful that no method of controlling the release of atomic energy had been developed. He hoped "that we should not discover it until Man was living at peace Germany and Soddy andJohn Cranston in with his neighbors." It wasn't to be. Scotland. Its name was changed from breSoddy left science and refrained from vium to protoactinium and then shortened performing any work that might further to protactinium in 1949. the achievement of controlled atomic enSoddy was not a traditional alchemist; ergy He changed his research focus to ecohis work was not about turning base metnomics, particularly to monetary theory als into gold—far from it. "Energy not gold, This transmutation didn't go over well. Acwill be the quest of the modern scientific cording to Thaddeus J. Trenn, a physicist alchemist," Soddy wrote. He envisioned and historian of science and religion at the nuclear scientists contributing to the good University of Toronto: "It has often been of humanity By the discovery of the imsaid of Soddy that he went 'off the rails' mense stores of energy in the atomic nuabout 1919.... His ensuing excommunicacleus, he wrote, "it, for the first time, trantion from the scientific community was spires that the hard struggle for existence conducted with the same righteous vigor on the bare leavings of natural energy in as was his exclusion from the esoteric cirwhich the race has evolved is no longer the cle of economists. He was loved by neither only possible or enduring lot of Man. It is and despised by all." a legitimate aspiration to believe that one day he will attain the power to regulate for All the while, artistic, political, and scihis own purposes the primary fountains of entific minds responded to the atom's poenergy which Nature now so jealously contential. Sodd/s lectures, published in 1909 serves for the future." as "The Interpretation of Radium" were used by H. G. Wells in his novel He envisioned a future Eden"The World Set Free," which he like Earth with clean air and wadedicated to Soddy The book ter and untold energy that could was published weeks before the never be used up—and an end outbreak of World War I. to poverty and suffering. And In the novel, prescient Wells scientists had the privilege and describes the first splitting of the the responsibility to bring this atom and a war in Europe in wealth to humanity According which cities are destroyed by to biographer Linda Merricks, CELEBRATING C&EN'S atom bombs dropped from airduring lectures Soddy gave in 80TH craft. Later in the book, Wells Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1914, he ANNIVERSARY describes the bomb sites as re"pointed out that the potential maining poisonous. In the midenergy contained in radium, 1930s, Wells's book, imbued with Sodd/s which was a million times greater than the ideas, set Leo Szilard thinking about the same weight of coal, would, if it could onpossibility of chain reactions and how they ly be harnessed, provide a might be used to create such a bomb. Or cheap and clean source of at least that's how the story goes. energy which could be In 1953, having seen the realization of turned into work." his worst fears in Hiroshima and NagasaBut Soddy had seen that ki, Soddy wrote, "We have to find out how science applied to world it comes about that science, which, withneeds could also be applied out economic exhaustion, provided the to destructive purposes. sinews ofwar for the most colossal and deOne example, particularly structive conflict in history, with the manstriking at the time, was power of the nations engaged in military that the 1909 developservice, has not yet abolished poverty and ment by Fritz Haber and degrading conditions of living from our Carl Bosch of a high-presmidst in the piping times of peace." We sure synthesis of ammonia still ask. on a large scale for the production of fertilizers could Linda Raber heads the ACS News
