Chapter 2: Max the scientist
After the war he went
into industry and we know that he was working at Osram, an electronics factory
in west London where he joined the company’s newly formed judo club,
the Osram Judokai. In 1958 Max
won the Royal Aeronautical Society’s Navigation Prize with a paper on
new methods of astronavigation, part of his long research into radiation
physics, both in the Royal Naval Scientific Service and in industry. In 1960, and again in 1961, he won the Radio Industry Council’s
National Award for Technical Writing, with two papers on infra-red radiation
physics.
In the mid-1950s Max moved from his job as a scientist at the Admiralty’s
research centre at Harlow, in Essex, to work at Kelvin and Hughes a few miles
away. The company specialised in marine radar but this was the Cold War period
and he headed a team of 20 engaged in secret work for the British government,
including devising systems able to monitor the launch of rockets in the Soviet
Union. He lunched frequently with high-ranking civil servants visiting from
London.
But Max did not fit the popular image of the
scientist as a specialist concentrating doggedly on solving a single problem
in a narrow field. His interests were broad, impelled by a restless urge
to explore the most advanced ideas in any field that attracted him. A
colleague in another team at Kelvin and Hughes, Dickie Huxley, says Max was
noted for the unusually long bibliographies at the end of his published papers
and articles. The navigation paper for the Royal Aeronautical Society concluded
by listing well over 200 sources. “If you wanted to know about something,
you didn’t read Maxwell’s work but simply looked up all the books
for which he had given references,” Huxley remembers.
Max
explained some of the findings in lectures he gave at the professional institutions
of which he was a member. In experimental science, of course, the laboratory
work is not definitive - there is a gap to be bridged, by development work,
between making a machine or process that functions in the laboratory and
the product that is marketed in the real world. Infra-red is no exception,
as an experience during one of his lectures shows.
He
was speaking at the Institute of Electrical Engineers, and had set up equipment
to demonstrate properties of infra-red waves. At the back of the lecture
theatre, behind the audience, he had placed a scanner to beam music by infra-red
to equipment at the front which would receive and play it. A member of the
audience, considering the possible uses, asked: “But will the system
work in fog?” “Oh, yes. For a million miles if required,” Max
replied confidently. He switched on and dramatic Valkyrian music erupted
from the loudspeakers. At that point someone in the audience blew cigar smoke
in front of the scanner and the music stopped. Max simply carried on unperturbed. “He
just ignored it,” Dickie Huxley recalls.
Max’s
working and personal life were subject to many changes. He
married three times, having two daughters by his first wife and a son and
adopted son with the second. He
talked little about his first two marriages but his third, to Isabel Badger
in 1972, was for the most part a happy relationship of kindred souls that
became a fulfilling working partnership.
There
was a droll side to Max’s character, which those who knew him well glimpsed
from time to time. It stemmed, perhaps, from his mother’s association
with the theatre. He maintained an alter ego as Mr Toad, the suave man about
town in top hat and tails of the kind once seen in the humorous magazine
Punch. Max drew a number of cartoons in which he featured as Mr Toad and
their address when he and Isabel lived at Hampton-on-Thames, near London,
was Toad Cottage.
For
10 years, from the early 1960s, he was the medical physics manager and chief
research engineer for infra-red devices at an international company - Smiths
Industries, at Cricklewood, north London, for which he travelled widely. One
of his projects here was a whole-body heat scanner - the Pyroscan - which
measured infra-red radiation from the body to reveal inflammation of tissue
by registering a temperature difference on the surface of the skin. This
seemed to have enormous potential in quickly pointing, for example, to possible
sites of cancer developing beneath the skin’s surface.
Infra-red
is the part of the radiation spectrum between visible light and radio waves.
It was discovered by the brilliant astronomer William Herschel in 1800 when
he found, by measuring the heat given off by the light of the rainbow passed
through a prism, that the greatest heat came from an area beyond the red
area of the spectrum. The modern thermographic cameras used in military applications
and in many industries, of which the Pyroscan was one, were all made possible
by this key observation.
The
Pyroscan system, which Max first developed as senior scientist in the laboratories
of Kelvin and Hughes in the 1950s, was the first non-military thermographic
camera to be developed outside the United States. It was the result of nearly
two years’ mathematical study of the transmission of radiation through
water droplets, carried out because the equipment was intended to see through
fog. As Max said later: “The original apparatus was in the true tradition
of British economy of means - even a broom handle being pressed into service
as a crank arm!”
His
hopes of developing a system for use in shipping, then in military aircraft
as an alternative to conventional radar, were not realised but at Smiths
Max was able to pursue the medical potential of thermography. In 1961 he
began collaboration with Lloyd Williams, a specialist at Middlesex Hospital,
and with a modified Pyroscan they obtained the first thermographs of breast
cancer produced outside America. Clinical
trials using a new version of the Pyroscan began at the hospital in mid-1963
and the machine was developed and went into production. Twice during this
period Max visited America to visit hospitals in pursuit of the research.
One outcome eventually was a specialist book, Clinical Thermography (ref
2-1), written jointly with John D. Wallace, Research Professor of Paediatrics
and Radiology at Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia.
But
fate intervened in Max’s career in medical physics. He walked out of
Smiths one lunchtime to buy something to eat and was knocked down by a hit-and-run
driver. His injuries included a broken neck, for the second time. While
he was convalescing he had to wear a neck brace and was unable to travel
for the company. His three-year contract was not renewed, so the Pyroscan research
was never finished.
It
was during his period at Smiths that Max was invited to speak at the Royal
Institution (RI), of which he was a member, on his research into infra-red
waves. The invitation was to
give one of the celebrated Friday Evening Discourses at which top scientists
explain their work to an audience of both their peers and lay people - as
part of the institution’s aim of “creating new knowledge and incorporating
awareness of contemporary science and technology into the fabric of culture
and society”. Max and Isabel were both very familiar with the RI because
he used the library facilities, with Isabel’s help, to aid his research.
Lecturing
at the Royal Institution can be intimidating even for accomplished lecturers.
The RI has existed continuously in the same premises since its foundation
in 1799; its magnificent building in Albemarle Street, off Piccadilly, with
its long facade of classical columns soaring to roof height, is little changed:
inside are chandeliered rooms with stucco ceilings - reminders of the opulent
private house it once was. Eminent
scientists stare down from prints and dark paintings hang on the walls. The
RI is associated with many figures, such as Herschel and Humphry Davy, inventor
of the miner's safety lamp. Michael Faraday, the great experimental scientist
whose discovery of magnetic induction made today's electrical industries
possible, worked there for several decades in his magnetic laboratory.
The
Friday Evening Discourses have been given regularly since 1826. Max, like
many before him and since, was to speak in the same steeply-tiered lecture
theatre where Faraday demonstrated the first dynamo and the first electric
motor. The date of his talk was March 8 1968 and the title: Seeing by Heat
Waves. Each Discourse is an
event bound by tradition and for Max it was no different. Members and their
guests - in evening dress - arrive and make their way upstairs to the library,
where there is a small exhibition on the theme of the talk. These days a string quartet plays in the downstairs foyer.
The
audience has to be seated before 9pm and the two entrance doors behind the
podium are closed. At exactly
9’oclock a bell rings once and the doors are swung open, the speaker
enters and immediately begins to deliver the lecture. Demonstrations,
projected slides, atomic models, and jokes, can follow in quick succession
but by tradition the talk must finish precisely at the moment the bell rings
for the second time at 10pm. Sitting through one of these lectures, it seems that the
warm applause at the end must be as much for the speaker’s skill in
finishing on time as much as their knowledge and presentation of the subject.
Afterwards, the audience files into adjoining rooms where plates of sandwiches
and cake, tea and soft drinks are laid out on long tables. Since the time is late the food is eaten with gusto, amid
lively conversation. It is a very English event.
“Max
was excited to give the talk. He rehearsed it several times,” Isabel
remembers. He arranged his library exhibition and before the event itself
they both joined Lord Fleck, president of the Royal Institution, for dinner.
The
talk, given to an audience of 350, was a summary of the field of infra-red
research and Max’s work with the Pyroscan. Among the demonstrations
of thermographic imaging were three pictures, taken at 20-second intervals,
showed a handprint fading on a surface. It was, Max explained, the lack of
sufficiently sensitive detectors that delayed for more than 100 years the
fulfilment of Herschel’s hope of visualising heat patterns. “The
magnitude of the problem may be appreciated from the fact that a modern thermocouple
is typically required to detect radiation which causes a temperature rise
of only one millionth of a degree, with a resulting electrical output of
less than a millivolt. In thermographic cameras like the Pyroscan the problem
is exacerbated by the need to make temperature measurements in a thousandth
of a second or less.” “Max
was excellent - word perfect,” Isabel recalls. “Though he was disappointed
to finish two words behind the final bell.” Afterwards, Fleck congratulated
him, saying: “Well done. In true Faraday style.”
Max
published about 150 scientific papers on navigation, radiation physics and
clinical psychology in the specialist journals (see Appendix 1). As his work
became increasingly respected his reputation grew. Among the professional bodies, he was a Fellow of the Royal
Society of Medicine and Royal Society of Health, a Member of the Institute
of Biology and the Institute of Physics, Fellow of the Institute of Electrical
Engineers, and an honorary member of the British Society of Medical and Dental
Hypnosis and many others.
In
the 1960s, pursuing yet more interests, he wrote a book on exobiology - possible
life on other planets - called Other Worlds than Ours, in which he was as
at home considering the possibility of life on other galaxies as on Mars
in our own solar system. With Delphine Davis Max
co-authored The Taming of the Thunderbolts, a book taking a close look at
the curious natural phenomenon of ball lightning. Again, this book was as
revealing about Max’s approach to science as about his subject. To make
his point that orthodox thinking “materially hindered our understanding
of an important branch of science”, he could not resist giving examples
of how closed attitudes had been proved wrong in the past. He
pointed out, for instance, that the designer Isambard Kingdom Brunel had
been ridiculed in the press when his paddle steamship Great Eastern was launched
in 1858, and Dr Dionysius Lardner, in an address to the Royal Society in
London, said: “Man might as well project a voyage to the moon as attempt
to employ steam navigation across the stormy Atlantic Ocean.”
So
Max was not deterred in the slightest to explore fields that more conventional
scientists would reject as without
foundation. Finally, in 1969, he found a subject that was to hold his interest
for the rest of his life and one for which his extraordinary background had
prepared him well. Now began several years’ intensive research into
altered mental states with Dr Ann Woolley-Hart, a medical researcher at St
Bartholomew’s Hospital, in London.
References 2-1 Clinical Thermography. J D Wallace and
C M Cade. CRC Press, Cleveland, Ohio, 1975