The Prix Leconte was one of the Academy’s prizes for “new and capital discoveries” in mathematics, physics, chemistry, natural history and the medical sciences, awarded as a single prize once in three years without regard to nationality. The programme of prizes for 1904, published in the Comptes rendus in December 1903, had said that the Academy would award it that year “if there is occasion”. There was. The commission that chose the winner was made up of Mascart, Troost, Darboux, Berthelot, Maurice Lévy, Henri Becquerel, Bouchard, Moissan, Janssen and de Lapparent, with Henri Poincaré as rapporteur, and its report was read at the Academy’s annual public session on Monday 19 December 1904, twelve weeks after Wood’s letter had appeared in London and seven after the Revue scientifique had printed it in French.
The report runs over two and a half pages of the Comptes rendus. All but its last six sentences are about the work Blondlot had done between 1876 and 1893: the polarisation capacity, electricity in hot gases, the instantaneity of the Kerr effect and of magnetic rotatory polarisation, the Hertzian waves along wires that verified Maxwell’s theory, and the rotating-mirror measurement that gave the speed of electric waves as the speed of light. Then come the six sentences. They are given here in the French of the Comptes rendus and in the translation used in the entry, which is the author’s own.
The French
Dans ces derniers temps, M. Blondlot a étudié de curieuses actions qu’il attribue à un rayonnement nouveau auquel il a donné le nom de rayons N.
Toutes les propriétés de ces rayons nouveaux ne sont pas encore bien connues et les circonstances n’ont pas permis à tous les membres de la Commission d’acquérir sur ces questions la conviction que peut seule donner l’observation personnelle.
Toutefois, sans préjuger encore la signification et la portée de ces nouvelles découvertes, la Commission n’a pas cru devoir différer davantage la récompense que ce savant avait depuis longtemps méritée. Elle a voulu en même temps affirmer sa confiance dans l’expérimentateur et lui donner un appui au milieu de difficultés qui peuvent compter parmi les plus grandes que les physiciens aient jamais rencontrées.
The English
In recent times, M. Blondlot has studied curious actions which he attributes to a new radiation, to which he has given the name of N rays.
Not all the properties of these new rays are yet well known, and circumstances have not allowed all the members of the Commission to acquire, on these questions, the conviction that only personal observation can give.
However, without yet prejudging the significance and the scope of these new discoveries, the Commission has not thought it right to put off any longer the reward that this scientist had long deserved. It has wished at the same time to affirm its confidence in the experimenter, and to give him support in the midst of difficulties which may count among the greatest that physicists have ever encountered.
Reading it
Three things in the passage are worth weighing against the rest of the entry.
The first is the phrase “the conviction that only personal observation can give”. By December 1904 the whole dispute was about whether personal observation could give conviction at all, since the only detector of the rays was the observer’s eye and Wood had shown, in the dark, that the eye went on reporting them when the apparatus had been taken away. The commission’s sentence treats a visit to Nancy as the thing that would have settled the question, which is what every physicist who believed in the rays also thought, and what every physicist who had been to Nancy and failed to see them had come to doubt.
The second is the word “experimenter”. The commission affirmed its confidence in the man. The report’s earlier pages had praised his “tact which allowed him to foresee and to avoid errors”. That is a judgement of character, offered in place of a judgement of the evidence, at the moment when the evidence was the thing in dispute.
The third is the care of the wording. The rays are “curious actions which he attributes to a new radiation”; the Commission does not say it attributes them to anything. It does not prejudge “the significance and the scope” of the discoveries, which is a way of not saying whether there are any. And the prize is “for the whole of his work”, with the rays in a paragraph at the end. Wood, remembering it in 1941, got the name of the prize and the sum wrong, but he remembered that phrase, and he was right that it was the Academy’s way of giving the prize and keeping its distance in the same breath. The Comptes rendus record is that the Academy “adopts the conclusions of this Report”.