Discoveries by Accident

Abstract

PROF. RUSS has quoted a passage from my summary of the Rutherford Memorial Lecture ; in the lecture itself I went on to pay a tribute to Röntgen and to Becquerel, emphasizing in particular that there was nothing in their general attack on the problems of X-rays and of radioactivity that could be described as in any way “accidental”. My only reason for mentioning at all the element of chance was that in this part of the lecture I was directing attention to the remarkable sequence of largely unrelated events which prepared, at exactly the right time, a field of work for Rutherford and a gateway for his entrance into this field.