V. MOSELEY’S REMARKABLE DISCOVERY
The foregoing result was only approximate. Indeed, there was internal evidence in Geiger and Marsden’s work itself that a half was somewhat too high. The answer was made very definite and very precise in 1913 through the extraordinary work of a brilliant young Englishman, Moseley, who, at the age of twenty-seven, had accomplished as notable a piece of research in physics as has appeared during the last fifty years. Such a mind was one of the early victims of the world-war. He was shot and killed instantly in the trenches in Gallipoli in the summer of 1915.
Laue in Munich had suggested in 1912 the use of the regular spacing of the molecules of a crystal for the analysis, according to the principle of the grating, of ether waves of very short wave-length, such as X-rays were supposed to be, and the Braggs[144] had not only perfected an X-ray spectrometer which utilized this principle, but had determined accurately the wave-lengths of the X-rays which are characteristic of certain metals. The accuracy with which this can be done is limited simply by the accuracy in the determination of
, so that the whole new field of exact X-ray spectrometry is made available through our exact knowledge of
. Moseley’s discovery,[145] made as a result of an elaborate and difficult study of the wave-lengths of the characteristic X-rays which were excited when cathode rays were made to impinge in succession upon anticathodes embracing most of the known elements, was that these characteristic wave-lengths of the different elements, or, better, their characteristic frequencies, are related in a very simple but a very significant way. These frequencies were found to constitute the same sort of an arithmetical progression as do the charges which we found to exist on our oil drops. It was the square root of the frequencies rather than the frequencies themselves which showed this beautifully simple relationship, but this is an unimportant detail. The significant fact is that, arranged in the order of increasing frequency of their characteristic X-ray spectra, all the known elements which have been examined constitute a simple arithmetical series each member of which is obtained from its predecessor by adding always the same quantity.
The plate opposite this page shows photographs of the X-ray spectra of a number of elements whose atomic numbers—that is, the numbers assigned them in Moseley’s arrangement of the elements on the basis of increasing X-ray frequency—are given on the left. These photographs were taken by Siegbahn.[146] The distance from the “central image”—in this case the black line on the left—to a given line of the line spectrum on the right is approximately proportional to the wave-length of the rays producing this line. The photographs show beautifully, first, how the atoms of all the elements produce spectra of just the same type, and, secondly, how the wave-lengths of corresponding lines decrease, or the frequencies increase, with increasing atomic number. The photograph on the left shows this progression for the highest frequency rays which the atoms produce, the so-called
series, while the one on the right shows the same sort of a progression for the rays of next lower frequency, namely, those of the so-called