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Although he had received many honours from learned societies, including an honorary Ll.D. from all four Scottish Universities – the only person to have done so – and though he was in future years to be the recipient of still further honours there came to him in 1904 the honour of a knighthood. While this signal mark of Royal favour and of national recognition of his unique services to science and through his research to the nation as a whole gave much pleasure to his colleagues, many of them, in later years, expressed their disappointment that it had not been followed by the award of The Order of Merit, the highest honour in the gift of sovereign and one which in their opinion he richly merited. In 1913 Sir James, as he must now be designated, published a notable paper showing that the mean atomic specific heats of the elements between the boiling points of liquid nitrogen and hydrogen exhibited, when plotted in terms of their atomic weights, a definite periodic variation instead of being approximately uniform as they are at ordinary temperatures. This was almost his last piece of freelance research before everything was called to a halt by the outbreak of The Great War in August 1914, after which all the nation’s resources, material and human, were mobilised for war work. The Royal Institution had from its inception been dedicated to disinterested scientific research with sufficient funds, obtained principally through donations, (note 34) to finance its work. Now funds dried up. Members of the staff were conscripted for national service. All the resources of The Royal Institution were directed towards serving the immediate national emergency and no longer was Sir James able to follow his own sweet will in matters of research. For him, the war years became a trying time. Not only – like Othello – was his occupation gone but he shared the anxieties common to all thoughtful men during those fateful and dangerous years and suffered, as was to be expected of a man of his sensitive nature, bouts of depression at the contemplation of the awful carnage and especially the slaughter of young life which the war entailed. Though now seventy-two years of age he was mentally as fit as ever he was. So it was surprising that the government did not make more use of his unique abilities particularly in view of the fact that as long ago as 1888 he had been associated with Sir Frederick Abel (note 35) in the invention of cordite, a smokeless fuel, which had been of immense benefit to both the army and the navy. Appointed by Earl Stanhope, the Secretary for War, along with Sir Frederick Abel and Professor Dupré, the latter of whom took little or no part in the affair, to examine the use of high explosives, Abel and Dewar quickly came to the conclusion that a better material than gun cotton was necessary and that none of the substitutes submitted by manufacturers were suitable. Accordingly, they devised, and in 1890 patented in favour of the Secretary of War, a new explosive compounded of gun cotton and nitroglycerine in cords or thread – hence the name cordite – which after exhaustive tests by the Director of Artillery, was found to be superior to anything so far possessed by the military authorities. All the tests resulted in its favour. Sent out to the northern regions of Canada and to India where it was tested under conditions of extreme cold and heat, and subjected to conditions of humidity in damp climates it was pronounced to possess better qualities than any other explosive. In announcing its acceptance by the government Mr Campbell Bannerman, who had succeeded Earl Stanhope, paid tribute to the two inventors in these words: “You may search not only this country but the world and not find two men more qualified to decide any question such as was submitted to them.” It is indeed surprising then that Sir James was not enlisted into full-time war service but bureaucracy probably thought, not knowing their man, that at the age of seventy-two he was too old to be useful for regular employment. In 1915 he was, however, called in by Lord Haldane, to advise on a particular problem about cordite and also to bring his exceptional knowledge to bear on the development of metal-jacketed containers for liquid oxygen to enable pilots to fly at very high altitudes. It also must have been a consolation to him to have known that his work with charcoal as an absorbent for gases was of great value in the designing of the gas masks which enabled our soldiers to withstand the gas attacks of the Germans which were launched during the second battle of Ypres.
In order to employ his days profitably he turned to one of his first loves and one on which he had delivered his first series of Christmas lectures to juveniles – Soap Bubbles and Soap Films. On March 17th, 1916, The Times carried an article entitled. “A Long Lived Soap Bubble”, in reference to a soap bubble which Sir James had exhibited on the previous afternoon during a lecture and which he had blown on 17th February. It was as perfect... NEXT PAGE
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