Frederick Soddy, 1877-1956

Frederick Soddy was a complex personality and if we are to arrive at any degree of understanding of its aspects, I believe we have to give more than usual place to the background of his early life. It has been my conception of his life that there was really four chapters in it— To 1900—his formative years, From 1900 to 1911—Montreal and the disintegration theory, From 1912 to 1918—Glasgow and isotopes, Onwards from 1919—Oxford and his social outlook. His Formative Years Soddy’s father was a relatively successful corn merchant who was 55 years old when Frederick was born, the seventh and last child. His father retained the inherited family tradition of deep religious feeling, consistently and regularly shown by public worship. Soddy’s grandfather had aspirations to be a missionary to the South Sea Islanders and had sailed for the Antipodes only to be captured by a French privateer in the year 1798. Calvinistic sermons, to which he was compelled to listen, made a deep impression on Soddy’s memories of his boyhood. These sermons were always extreme in their views and practically always contained dire threats of what might follow any tendency to leanings towards the Catholic Faith. Soddy disagreed with those views very deeply, but for understanding him it should be remembered that he was brought up in this family tradition stemming from his grandfather’s time and in his own case, from his childhood. An ‘evangel’ of some sort was a usual and not a rare guest in the household. And so in the approach he was liable to make to things in general, I have regarded his basic method of going hard at an idea without regard to the finer feelings of others, as being to a considerable extent derived from the atmosphere of family Galvinistic outlook to which he was accustomed in his early years. Truth as it was conceived was the essential thing. The method of its presentation, even at the expense of other people’s feelings, was unimportant.