June 1920

摘要

The Engineer, especially in its early years, was very practical; the stuff of nuts and bolts, big lumps of iron and steel, rivets and steam. So it was with an almost audible grinding of mental gears that the journal took a stab at describing the world inside the atom and what it might mean to engineers in 1920. This was the height of the discoveries of the quantum mechanical revolution in physics. Ernest Rutherford had split the atom in 1917, and three years later gave a lecture at the Royal Society describing his findings. The Engineer sent a representative to the lecture, who found himself wondering what significance the discovery of the electron, in particular, might have for engineers.