Professor Dewar
Is a better man than you are,
None of you asses
Can condense gases.
Although the subject of one of E. C. Bentley's clever clerihews in Biography for beginners (1905), James Dewar has never been the subject of a proper biography despite his eponymous connection with a standard piece of laboratory equipment and the ubiquitous Thermos flask. When the low-temperature physicist Kurt Mendelssohn came to Britain from Germany in 1933, Dewar had already been completely forgotten by cryogenicists. To some extent this neglect was due to the fact that after giving way to Kamerlingh Onnes in research in cryogenics at the beginning of the twentieth century, Dewar had spent the remaining 20 years of his life in what many physical scientists thought to be trivial work—the investigation of soap bubbles. However, there was another reason, as Sir John Rowlinson's fine appraisal reveals in the subtitle: Dewar's ruthlessness and bad temper had left him with few scientific friends. To misquote Lear, it was not pleasant to know Mr Dewar. Moreover, as a lone worker at the Royal Institution he had no disciples and no former members of a research school who wished to honour him. It is true that his one close friend, the organic chemist Henry Edward Armstrong, spent several months after his death collecting tributes in an attempt to say something nice about Dewar, but Armstrong's short memoir of 32 pages based on a Friday Evening Discourse at the Royal Institution hardly did his subject justice.
But surely a scientist with severe character faults like Dewar's would form an ideal subject for the historian of science? Yes, of course: but Dewar left another stumbling block, namely that his atrocious and unreadable handwriting deterred would-be biographers who did not want to base a biography solely on Dewar's published papers. A helpful step was made in the 1980s when the Royal Society gave a grant to the Royal Institution so that Dewar's letters and manuscripts could be properly catalogued and dated. Nevertheless, until Sir John stepped into the breach, historians remained deterred by the investment of time needed in deciphering (or, rather, guessing) what Dewar's screed actually said and meant.
Historians of science have tended to favour biographies of theoreticians rather than practical men of science—Faraday being the great exception. It might therefore be thought that Sir John, a distinguished theoretical chemist and Physical Secretary of the Royal Society from 1994 to 1999, would find Dewar's very practical kind of chemical physics rather uncongenial. In practice, he sees Dewar as being in the tradition of Faraday and admires his practical skills. Although Dewar was no theoretician and had to consult his brother-in-law, the Cambridge mathematician Hamilton Dickson, for mathematical and theoretical interpretations of his investigations, Rowlinson brings his expertise to bear on Dewar rather as Maxwell did for Faraday.
The study is chronological, except where it makes sense to provide a complete temporal treatment of a particular topic: the 11 chapters deal with Dewar's boyhood; his early years at Edinburgh, where in 1867 he constructed what Armstrong called ‘firetong’ models of benzene, including what later became known as ‘Dewar benzene’; the Jacksonian Chair of Natural Philosophy at Cambridge, which Dewar obstinately refused to retire from; his spiteful treatment of his Cambridge assistants such as Siegfried Ruhemann; the long partnership with George Liveing in spectroscopy that gave physicists the s, p, d (sharp, principal, diffuse) notation; his appointment at the Royal Institution and direction of its laboratory; his commercial work (including the partnership with Frederick Abel in developing cordite in rivalry with Alfred Nobel, whose explosives consultant Dewar had been, and the notorious patent case that resulted); a long account of Dewar's work on the liquefaction of air and hydrogen and the abortive attempts to liquefy helium, including the contretemps with the inventor William Hampson; the misinterpretation of argon as a nitrogen isomer and the mutual dislike between Dewar and Ramsay that flared up embarrassingly in 1897, when both men were rivals for the presidency of the Chemical Society; the Davy–Faraday Laboratory and Dewar's brutal treatment of its superintendent, Alexander Scott, and of William Crookes's son, Henry Crookes; and finally, Dewar's (and with him, the Royal Institution's) long decline from 1901 until his death in 1923. A technical appendix provides illumination with a discussion of the thermodynamics of liquefaction that Dewar probably never fully understood.
This is a biography that will be read with pleasure by both historians and physical scientists. It deals concisely with the extraordinary range of Dewar's work, leaving few stones unturned. (I would have liked to read more about Dewar's support for the Physical Society, and there is a missed opportunity to investigate why Dewar accused the Royal Society of favouring biological over physical research in awarding its government grants in the 1890s.) The book captures Dewar's difficult personality wonderfully and, without disguising his many faults and unpleasant characteristics, renders him the complete, dedicated scientist. Overall, Dewar emerges as a heroic figure, despite the unsightly warts, and above all one of Britain's greatest experimental scientists.