“It is my wish to provide all instruments for the Cavendish Laboratory which Professor Maxwell may consider to be immediately required, either in his lectures or otherwise.”
Maxwell prepared a list, but explained while doing it that time and thought were necessary to secure the best form of instruments; and he continues, writing to the Vice-Chancellor: “I think the Duke fully understood from what I said to him that to furnish the Laboratory will be a matter of several years’ duration. I shall consider myself, however,” he says, “at liberty to contribute to the Laboratory any instruments which I have had constructed in former years, and which may be found still useful, and also from time to time to procure others for special researches.”
In 1877 in his annual report Professor Maxwell announced that the Chancellor[39] had now “completed his gift to the University by furnishing the Cavendish Laboratory with apparatus suited to the present state of science.”
The stock of apparatus, however, was still small, although Maxwell in the most generous manner himself spent large sums in adding to it; for the Professor was most particular in procuring only expensive instruments by the best makers, with such additional improvements as he could himself suggest.
In March, 1874, a Demonstratorship of Physics had been established, and Mr. Garnett of St. John’s College was appointed.
Work began in the laboratory in October, 1874. At first the number of students was small. Only seventeen names appear in the Natural Sciences Tripos[40] list for 1874, and few of those did Physics.
The fear alluded to by the Professor in his introductory lecture, that men reading for the Mathematical Tripos would not find time for attendance at the laboratory, was justified. One of the weaknesses of our Cambridge plan has been the divorce between Mathematics and experimental work, encouraged by our system of examinations. Experimental knowledge is supposed not to be needed for the Mathematical Tripos; the Mathematics permitted in the Natural Sciences Tripos are very simple; thus it came about that few men while reading for the Mathematical Tripos attended the laboratory, and this unfortunate result was intensified by the action of the University in 1877–78, when the regulations for the Mathematical Tripos were again altered.[41]
Still there were pupils eager and willing to work, though they were chiefly men who had already taken their B.A. degree, and who wished to continue Physical reading and research, even though it involved “a considerable amount of dull labour not altogether attractive.” My own work there began in 1876, and it may be interesting if I recall my reminiscences of that time.
The first experiments I can recollect related to the measurement of electrical resistance. I well remember Maxwell explaining the principle of Wheatstone’s bridge, and my own wish at the time that I had come to the laboratory before the Tripos, instead of afterwards. Lord Rayleigh had, during the examination, set an easy question which I failed to do for want of some slight experimental knowledge, and the first few words of Maxwell’s talk showed me the solution.
I did not attend his lectures regularly—they were given, I think, at an hour which I was obliged to devote to teaching; besides, there was his book, the “Electricity and Magnetism,” into which I had just dipped before the Tripos, to work at.