Ernest Howard Griffiths, 1851-1932

Abstract

The triumphs of recent physical science have been so great, and have so filled our minds, that the work of those who completed the scheme of physics characteristic of the nineteenth century is in danger of being forgotten or, at best, regarded merely from the historical point of view. Forty years ago, it seemed that the main outlines of physics had been laid down once for a ll; it remained merely to carry the accuracy of physical measurements to another place of decimals, and devise a convincing electro-mechanical structure for the luminiferous aether. Yet, from nineteenth-century physics, those of the twentieth arose. The methods of the one enabled pioneers to reach the new fields of the other, and the older mechanical theories of matter and energy led naturally to the wider, if vaguer, concepts of to-day. Even the road by which the new fields were approached, the discharge of electricity through gases, was traced by means of that concept of ions developed in the older theory of liquid electrolysis. This sketch may help to make clear the place of Griffiths in the history of science. He was not a pioneer in physical theory, but, accepting the ideas of his age, he used his remarkable experimental skill, and his insight into what was worth doing, to investigate the possibilities of laboratory apparatus, and then to obtain the highest attainable accuracy in the measurements of really important physical constants. Although some of his later determinations were useful as a test of the quantum theory, his real work was done in helping to finish the structure of nineteenth-century physics.