the year 1933. From the first detection of radio-activity to its first
subjugation to human purpose measured little more than a quarter of
a century. For twenty years after that, indeed, minor difficulties
prevented any striking practical application of his success, but the
essential thing was done, this new boundary in the march of human
progress was crossed, in that year. He set up atomic disintegration in a
minute particle of bismuth; it exploded with great violence into a heavy
gas of extreme radio-activity, which disintegrated in its turn in the
course of seven days, and it was only after another year's work that he
was able to show practically that the last result of this rapid release
of energy was gold. But the thing was done--at the cost of a blistered
chest and an injured finger, and from the moment when the invisible
speck of bismuth flashed into riving and rending energy, Holsten knew
that he had opened a way for mankind, however narrow and dark it might
still be, to worlds of limitless power. He recorded as much in the
strange diary biography he left the world, a diary that was up to that
particular moment a mass of speculations and calculations, and which
suddenly became for a space an amazingly minute and human record of
sensations and emotions that all humanity might understand.

He gives, in broken phrases and often single words, it is true, but none
the less vividly for that, a record of the twenty-four hours following
the demonstration of the correctness of his intricate tracery of
computations and guesses. 'I thought I should not sleep,' he writes--the
words he omitted are supplied in brackets--(on account of) 'pain in
(the) hand and chest and (the) wonder of what I had done.... Slept like
a child.'

He felt strange and disconcerted the next morning; he had nothing to do,
he was living alone in apartments in Bloomsbury, and he decided to go
up to Hampstead Heath, which he had known when he was a little boy as a
breezy playground. He went up by the underground tube that was then
the recognised means of travel from one part of London to another, and
walked up Heath Street from the tube station to the open heath. He
found it a gully of planks and scaffoldings between the hoardings of
house-wreckers. The spirit of the times had seized upon that narrow,
steep, and winding thoroughfare, and was in the act of making it
commodious and interesting, according to the remarkable ideals of
Neo-Georgian aestheti