Follow-up Q01: "the experiments of Rutherford and his co-workers" (Radiant Energy, p.54)

Date: 2026-10-06. Follow-up investigator (STEP F). Web time: about 3 minutes (Chrome; timer 1791342568 to 1791342715). Stopped early because the question was answered: the source of the sentence was found.

The question

In Radiant Energy ("1926", p.54) Moray writes that it "could prove profitable if these experiments of Rutherford and his co-workers were taken up again." What did he most likely mean? Which of Rutherford's experiments, and how would taking them up again connect to the radiant energy device and to his later transmutation and direct-conversion work?

What Moray's text says

• Radiant Energy, printed page 54 (PDF page 55): after describing alpha particles (mass about that of hydrogen, speed "one-tenth that of light", "70,000 per second" per gram for uranium and thorium, "a hundred thousand millions" for radium) and the spinthariscope, the text reads: "The high speed of the alpha particles seem very difficult to explain. ... a velocity of 30,000 kilometres per second seems to be more difficult to explain. It could prove profitable if these experiemnts of Rutherford and his co-workers were take up again. These velocities may not be produced instantaneously; they are only comprehensible on the hypothesis that the particles of atoms can be compared to small planetary systems animated with enormous velocities. They would preserve their speed on leaving their orbits as does a stone launched from a sling." [read: _text/Books-Works-by-Moray-Radiant-Energy-radiant-energy-1926-a4beae.txt, p.55 of the PDF, printed "Page 54"]
• The same sentence is in the 1945 printing [read: research/files/IA_Moray-compilation_BeyondLightRays_RadiantEnergy1945_Therapy1946_OCR.txt, line 3219] and in The Sea of Energy in Which the Earth Floats, 4th ed. 1960 (PDF p.86 of the scan) and 5th ed. 1978 [read: _text grep]. The "1926" printing itself mentions the atomic pile and plutonium, so it was compiled after 1945 (facts.json; qe.md).
• Six pages later (printed p.60) Moray, in his own voice, cites "The work of Sir Rutherford with helimm and nitrogen transmutation into oxygen and hydrogen and later experiments with uranium and plutonium" as proof that "the alchemists were right", and says he has split "the nuclei of paper, of lead, tantalum, mercury, tungsten, gold, copper and aluminum by a method far less expensive than the cyclotron" and made tritium by electrolysis [read: same file, PDF p.61].
• 1962 Valley State College speech: "Lord Rutherford and his collaborators conceived the atom as a miniature solar system ... Analogy is perhaps the most powerful conceptual tool for understanding new phenomena" [read: _text/Books-Works-by-Moray-Valley-State-College-Jan-23-1962-fc623b.txt, PDF p.5].
• 1968 Air Force Systems Command proposal (direct conversion from radioactive materials), p.2: "We draw attention to the point that Sir Ernest Rutherford, James Chadwick, Ph. D., and C.D. Ellis, Ph. D., Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, referred to direct conversion as a means of identifying particles in 1899, while Dr. Gustave LeBon referred to it as early as 1897." The same page quotes Safenev (ASTIA AD 144303): "Experiments dating back to 1913 have generated electricity from charged particles emanating from nuclear disintegrations." The proposal's exciter is "a low-energy radioactive isotope" (2.5-8 MeV, the alpha-particle range) acting on a doped semiconductor in cold-cathode tubes, and p.11 rests the "ionic action" of the tubes on the fact that "when various substances are bombarded with alpha particles, they are found to give off electrons" (Thomson's delta rays), adding that "some 'particle' from the Cosmos with greater penetrating power than Alpha particles" might do the same [read: _text/gov-Airforce-Materials-Command-Direct-Energy-Conversion-from-Radioactive-Materia-f21d20.txt, pp.1-2, 11-12].
• Rex Research transcription of the Institute's transmutation material (p.11): "Lord Rutherford and his collaborators in Cambridge, England, succeeded in converting nitrogen atoms into oxygen atoms by bombarding nitrogen with his speed alpha particles" [read: _text/zz-Misc-Rex-Research-Thomas-H-b42bf5.txt, p.11].

What was searched

What was found

1. The sentence is Gustave Le Bon's, lightly reworded. Le Bon, The Evolution of Matter (French 1905; English translation by F. Legge, Walter Scott/Scribner, printing shown as 1909), Book IV, Chapter III ("The Dematerialization of Very Radioactive Substances"): "a velocity of 30,000 kilometers/second seems to be very difficult to explain, and I think that, on this point, the experiments of Rutherford and his pupils should be taken up anew (2)." [web https://www.rexresearch.com/lebonmat/lebonmat.htm]. The surrounding paragraphs (alpha mass and charge, one-tenth of light speed, 70,000 per gram per second for uranium and thorium, the spinthariscope, the planetary-system and sling explanation, the beta-ray paragraph) are the paragraphs Moray reproduces, in the same order. Moray's version drops Le Bon's "I think", changes "pupils" to "co-workers" and "should be taken up anew" to "It could prove profitable if ... were taken up again", and drops Le Bon's footnote. No attribution to Le Bon was seen in the Moray pages read. (This agrees with facts.json's note that the 5th edition's Ch.9 is "largely Le Bon".)
2. Le Bon's footnote says what he meant. "(2) it seems possible that this high speed can be explained by supposing that, although the alpha particles are being constantly emitted, it is only when they reach a certain velocity that their existence can be recognized by us. Thus, Strutt in reviewing Prof. Rutherford's Radio-Activity (2nd ed.), says: 'Ordinary matter may be emitting as many or more alpha particles than uranium, if only their velocity is less than that minimum velocity which has been found necessary to produce the characteristic phenomenon' (Nature, 25 January 1906)." [web, same page]. Le Bon's whole book argues that all matter dissociates and radiates ("radioactivity universal property of matter"); a detection threshold would explain why ordinary matter seems inert.
3. The experiments in question are Rutherford's alpha-velocity measurements of 1902-1906. Rutherford's 1908 Nobel lecture: magnetic and electric deflection (1902-03) gave "the velocity of the swiftest particles was about 2.5 x 10^9 cm per second, or one-twelfth the velocity of light"; with a homogeneous radium C source and absorbing screens (1905-06), "All a-particles apparently lost their characteristic properties of ionization, phosphorescence and photographic action, at exactly the same point while they were still moving at a speed of about 9,000 kilometres per second. At this critical speed, the a-particle suddenly vanishes from our ken" [web https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1908/rutherford/lecture/]. This "critical speed" is the minimum velocity Strutt refers to. The paper is E. Rutherford, "Retardation of the alpha particle from radium in passing through matter", Phil. Mag., August 1906 [web Semantic Scholar listing, via Google]. The same lecture quotes Rutherford and Soddy (1903): the atoms "are made up, in part at least, of rapidly rotating or oscillating systems of heavy charged bodies ... The sudden escape of these masses from their orbit may be due either to the action of internal forces or external forces of which we have at present no knowledge" [web, same]. Le Bon's planetary-system and sling explanation restates this.
4. Scattering (1909-1911) and the 1919 nitrogen transmutation are not what the sentence refers to. Le Bon wrote in 1905, before both. Moray does cite the 1919 transmutation separately, in his own words, six pages later and in the Institute material (see above).
5. Rutherford's laboratory also built the first device that turned decay particles directly into electricity. H. G. J. Moseley, "The attainment of high potentials by the use of radium", Proc. Roy. Soc. A 88 (1913) 471-476; Moseley worked under Rutherford at Manchester, and the paper is cited today as the start of atomic (nuclear) batteries [web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Moseley ; Google results citing the paper in betavoltaic literature]. Moseley's cell collected beta particles in a vacuum vessel (radium source inside a silvered glass sphere) and reached about 150 kV [memory, medium]. The 1968 proposal's "Experiments dating back to 1913" (quoted from Safenev) fits Moseley's cell; the proposal itself does not name Moseley, so this identification is mine.
6. "1899" in the 1968 proposal. Rutherford's 1899 paper, "Uranium radiation and the electrical conduction produced by it" (Phil. Mag. 47, 1899), separated alpha and beta rays by the rate at which they discharged an electroscope through aluminium foils [web, Nobel lecture, ref. 1]. That is electrical detection of particles, which the proposal calls "direct conversion as a means of identifying particles". The "Rutherford, Chadwick and Ellis" credit probably points to their book Radiations from Radioactive Substances (1930), which reviews these methods [memory, medium; the proposal gives no title].

Reasoning: what Moray most likely meant

Known: the sentence was written by Le Bon in 1905 and means "repeat Rutherford's measurements of alpha-particle velocity, because the speed is hard to explain and slower particles from ordinary matter may be escaping detection". Moray took over Le Bon's paragraphs, the sentence and the c.1905 numbers (one-tenth of light speed; 30,000 km/s; 70,000 alphas per gram per second for uranium), which had been revised by the time of the 1945 printing (Rutherford's own swiftest figure was one-twelfth of light speed in 1908).

Inferred (competing readings; the record allows more than one): - A. Copying with assent, no specific programme. Moray reproduced the passage as part of a long Le Bon section and changed only the wording; "profitable" may simply be a paraphrase of "should be taken up anew". On this reading the sentence tells us what Moray read (Le Bon), not what he planned. - B. Le Bon's own point, adopted. Moray accepted Le Bon's thesis of universal dissociation and its corollary that matter emits energy below the thresholds of ordinary instruments. That matches his device claims: a "sea of energy" invisible to standard meters, a detector "valve" that captures it, and his 1960 remark that present instruments are "of no value" for the valves (claims.md, Claim 3 and Source gap). Taking up Rutherford's threshold experiments would then mean looking for the sub-threshold emission that the detector supposedly collects. "Profitable" would carry a practical, even commercial, sense. - C. A bridge to his later work. In his later writings Rutherford's name stands for three things: the planetary atom (1962 speech), alpha bombardment that transmutes nitrogen (printed p.60; Institute transmutation material), and charge from decay particles as a power source (1968 proposal, with Le Bon). The 1968 design (an alpha-range isotope exciting a doped semiconductor, collecting charge in cold tubes) is in effect a "taking up again" of the 1899-1913 Rutherford-school work on particle-induced ionization and charge collection, Moseley's cell included. The p.54 sentence predates this framing in his texts (1945 at the latest), so reading it as a plan for direct conversion is hindsight. It is consistent with where he went, not evidence that he meant it then.

Still open: whether Moray knew or acknowledged that the passage was Le Bon's (no attribution in the pages read; the 4th and 5th editions were not checked for a Le Bon credit elsewhere in the book); when he first used the passage (1945 is the earliest dated printing in hand; the "originally compiled 1926" claim is not verified); and whether any Moray lab note describes an experiment on alpha velocities or thresholds (none in the folder).

Leads for the next review update

• (follow-up Q01) Radiant Energy pp.52-56 (and Sea of Energy Ch.9) reproduce Le Bon, The Evolution of Matter, Book IV Ch.III nearly verbatim, without visible credit; the "Rutherford" sentence and its numbers are Le Bon's of 1905. Bears on Claim 5 (dissociation of matter) and on how the reviewers weigh the physics passages as Moray's own.
• (follow-up Q01) Le Bon's text has "not only with salts of radium, but also with divers substances, notably thorium and uranium", confirming that Moray's "now only" is a slip for "not only" and that the spinthariscope sentence is also Le Bon's (bears on Q04).
• (follow-up Q01) 1968 proposal's precedents: Rutherford 1899 electrometer method; Safenev's "1913" = Moseley's radium beta cell (Rutherford's Manchester laboratory), the first atomic battery. Bears on Claim 4 (the 1968 recasting of the valve).