From an Old Sketch

Five years ago a distinguished Russian-born scientist named Peter Kapitza committed an imprudence. He was, at the time, comfortably installed in England. His mistake was that he went back to Russia.

At Cambridge University's famed Cavendish Laboratory, Peter Kapitza had done such astonishing work on magnetism and low temperatures that they built a special laboratory for him. By building up and suddenly short-circuiting huge accumulations of electricity through a set of coils, Kapitza produced magnetic fields five times more powerful than any before.

To keep the coils from blowing up, Kapitza cooled them with liquid helium (four degrees or less above absolute zero). He designed his own helium liquefier.

Helium is the hardest of all gases to liquefy. The standard method involves liquid hydrogen, which is unstable and highly explosive. Kapitza's method not only did away with liquid hydrogen, but. cut the cost of making a quart from $50 to $5, the time from 24 hours to two hours or less. In the neighborhood of absolute zero, ordinary lubricants freeze hard as iron and Kapitza's problem was to find a lubricant for his compressor. He solved the problem by allowing a little helium vapor to squeeze through the piston clearance, so that the helium itself did the lubricating.

In 1935 Kapitza went to the U. S. S. R. to attend a scientific meeting. When he started back to England, the dictatorship of the proletariat stopped him, said he was needed at home (TIME, Nov. 25, 1935). There were frustrated roars from the late Lord Rutherford and other big wigs of British science, only miserable silence from Kapitza.

Meanwhile, in the U. S., Physicist Cecil Taverner Lane of Yale decided to build a Kapitza liquefier. He sent to Cambridge for blueprints. Unwilling to dismantle the machine for the sake of exact measurements, Cambridge sent only sketches, which showed valves in impossible places and other aberrations. Nevertheless Dr. Lane persevered, correcting the mistakes in the sketches by hunch and logic as he went along. It took him three years, cost $5,000. Last week he announced that he had successfully completed a Kapitza liquefier, was making liquid helium for low-temperature research quickly and safely, and at a cost of $5 a quart. It is the only Kapitza liquefier in the Western Hemisphere.

When Dr. Lane started his difficult job, he got an encouraging but not enormously helpful letter from Peter Kapitza. He has not heard from the prisoner scientist since. Apparently the Soviets disapproved the correspondence.

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