1895 and the Cavendish connection

The period 1895 to 1897 was a vintage time for physical science, perhaps its greatest vintage ever, and one of the chief vineyards proved to be the Cavendish Laboratory for Experimental Physics down Free School Lane in the ancient English university town of Cambridge. At Cambridge, some 5 months before Röntgen's discovery of X‐rays on 8 November 1895, the academic politicians, after agonizing long over the matter, decided to admit graduates of other universities to the University as research students, without requiring them to first under‐take a preliminary 3 year Cambridge Bachelor of Arts degree. Some 5 weeks before Röntgen's discovery, within 24 h of each other, the first two students to avail themselves of this new possibility appeared in Cambridge. Both made their way to the Cavendish Laboratory for Experimental Physics.1 One, an Irishman, John Townsend, went on to become Waynflete Professor of Physics in the University of Oxford. The other was a youth from the far antipodes; a young man with a somewhat bucolic manner and a booming voice. The Director of the Cavendish Laboratory, JJ Thomson,2 and his wife seemed to take an immediate liking to the New Zealand flax farmer's son