The Postcard
A Rotophot postcard featuring a photograph of a western woman wearing a Japanese kimono.
The image perhaps takes its inspiration from Claude Monet's 1876 painting La Japonaise which shows a European woman wearing a Japanese kimono. To see the Monet painting, please search for the tag 24CML65.
The card was posted in Burnley using a ½d. stamp on Sunday the 3rd. September 1905. It was sent to:
Miss B. Garwood,
Ethel Villa,
Ethel Road,
Lowestoft.
The message on the divided back of the card was as follows:
"Burnley,
Lancs.
Dear Bea,
Don't you think this
is sweet?
Love Jack."
A Terrorist Bomb
So what else happened on the day that Jack posted the card to Bea?
Well, on the 3rd. September 1905, at least 30 people were killed by a terrorist bomb in Barcelona while watching a parade of Spanish Marine Infantry.
An Earthquake in Los Angeles
Also on that day, Los Angeles was struck by an earthquake, but without significant damage.
Carl David Anderson
The 3rd. September 1905 also marked the birth, in NYC, of the American physicist Carl David Anderson.
Carl was a 1936 Nobel Prize laureate for his discovery of the positron, and was later the discoverer of the muon.
Anderson was the son of Swedish immigrants. He studied physics and engineering at Caltech (B.S., 1927; Ph.D., 1930). Carl's 1930 doctoral thesis was titled 'Space-distribution of x-ray photoelectrons ejected from the K and L atomic energy-levels.'
Under the supervision of Robert A. Millikan, he began investigations into cosmic rays, during the course of which he encountered unexpected particle tracks in his cloud chamber photographs.
These he correctly interpreted as having been created by a particle with the same mass as the electron, but with an opposite electrical charge.
This discovery, announced in 1932 and later confirmed by others, validated Paul Dirac's theoretical prediction of the existence of the positron.
Anderson first detected the particles in cosmic rays. He then produced more conclusive proof by shooting gamma rays produced by the natural radioactive nuclide ThC into other materials, resulting in the creation of positron-electron pairs.
For this work, Anderson shared the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics with Victor Hess. Fifty years later, Anderson acknowledged that his discovery was inspired by the work of his Caltech classmate Chung-Yao Chao, whose research formed the foundation from which much of Anderson's work developed, although this was not credited at the time.
Modern versions of a cloud chamber are now commonly referred to as an Anderson cloud chamber.
Also in 1936, Anderson and his first graduate student, Seth Neddermeyer, discovered a muon (or 'mu-meson', as it was known for many years).
The muon is a subatomic particle 207 times more massive than the electron, but with the same negative electric charge and spin 1/2 as the electron, again in cosmic rays.
Anderson and Neddermeyer at first believed that they had seen a pion, a particle which Hideki Yukawa had postulated in his theory of the strong interaction.
When it became clear that what Anderson had seen was not the pion, the physicist I. I. Rabi, puzzled as to how the unexpected discovery could fit into any logical scheme of particle physics, quizzically asked "Who ordered that?" (sometimes the story goes that he was dining with colleagues at a Chinese restaurant at the time).
The muon was the first of a long list of subatomic particles whose discovery initially baffled theoreticians who could not make the confusing "zoo" fit into some tidy conceptual scheme.
Willis Lamb, in his 1955 Nobel Prize Lecture, joked that he had heard it said that:
"The finder of a new elementary particle used
to be rewarded by a Nobel Prize, but such a
discovery now ought to be punished by a
10,000 dollar fine."
Anderson spent all of his academic and research career at Caltech. During World War II, he conducted research into rocketry there.
Carl was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society in 1938. He received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1975.
Carl died in San Marino, Ca. at the age of 85 on the 11th. January 1991, and was laid to rest in the Forest Lawn, Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles. His wife Lorraine died in 1984.
