Background

Ethnicity: Lindemann's father emigrated to the United Kingdom circa 1871 and became naturalized. His mother was American of Scottish descent.

Lindemann was born on April 5, 1886, in Baden-Baden, Germany. He father was Adolph Friedrich Lindemann, a wealthy Alsatian engineer who became a British subject after the Franco-Prussian War; his mother, Olga Noble, was American and of Scottish descent.

Education

Lindemann was educated in Scotland and Germany, and took his Ph.D. from Humboldt University of Berlin with Nernst in 1910. Together they formulated the Nernst-Lindemann theory of specific heats, and at the same time Lindemann derived his formula relating the melting point of a crystal to the amplitude of vibration of its atoms.

Career

Lindemann returned to Britain in August 1914 and joined the Royal Aircraft Establishment to work on problems of flight. Aircraft at that time were prone to spin uncontrollably, often crashing fatally. Lindemann worked out the relevant theory, showed how to recover an aircraft from a spin, and made the first tests of the theory himself. Despite defective eyesight, he had already learned to fly.

In 1919, backed by his friend Henry Tizard, whom he had met in Nerast’s laboratory, Lindemann was appointed Dr. Lee’s professor of experimental philosophy at Oxford and head of the Clarendon Laboratory. The laboratory was then moribund, for almost no research had been done during its fifty years of existence, Lindemann started the long fight to build it up, often against the prejudice of the classical tradition at Oxford; and in 1933 he strengthened it by giving hospitality to Jewish emigrés from Germany, led by Franz Simon.

During this period he had become the friend of Winston Churchill, and from 1932 the two fought to awaken Britain to the German threat and to the need - and hope - for effective air defense. Here, unhappily, he quarreled with Tizard, who had returned to this field. Ostensibly the quarrel was over priorities, but there was a deeper conflict of personalities, and from 1933 to 1939 Lindemann was in eclipse.

The return of Churchill to the Admiralty brought Lindemann forward as his scientific adviser, a relationship maintained after Churchill became prime minister in 1940. Lindemann advised him over the entire fields of science and economics.

Lindemann’s wartime advice was sometimes controversial, but the fact that it was sought and accepted signified a changed attitude in the British government. For the first time since the brilliant exception of Lyon Playfair in the nineteenth century, a scientist had a direct voice in national affairs. This change was effected mutually by Churchill and Cherwell, who had been ennobled in 1941 and appointed paymaster general in 1942.

Cherwell returned to Oxford in 1945 but was again with Churchill as paymaster general from 1951 to 1953 and accompanied him to summit meetings. He was primarily responsible for establishing the Atomic Energy Authority, and when this was assured he returned to Oxford. He retired from his chair in 1956 but continued to influence Churchill’s thought, especially regarding technology. The two wanted to establish in England an institution similar to MIT but tradition proved too strong and a compromise was reached in founding a new college at Cambridge, Churchill College, intended especially to promote technology.

Achievements

• Lindemann is best remembered as prime scientific adviser to Winston Churchill in World War II. He advocated the "area" bombing of German cities and doubted the sophistication of Nazi Germany's radar technology and the existence of its "V" weapons programme.

Politics

Lindemann's political career was a result of his close friendship with Winston Churchill, who protected Lindemann from the many in Government he had snubbed and insulted. "Love me, love my dog, and if you don't love my dog, you damn well can't love me," Churchill reportedly said to a member of Parliament who had questioned his reliance on Lindemann, and later to the same MP Churchill added, "Don't you know that he is one of my oldest and greatest friends?"

In July 1941 Lindemann was raised to the peerage as Baron Cherwell, of Oxford in the County of Oxford. The following year he was made Paymaster-General by Churchill, an office he retained until 1945. In 1943 he was also sworn of the Privy Council. When Churchill returned as Prime Minister in 1951, Lindemann was once again appointed Paymaster-General, this time with a seat in the cabinet. He continued in this post until 1953. In 1956 he was made Viscount Cherwell of Oxford, in the County of Oxford.

Views

Lindemann supported eugenics and held the working class, homosexuals, and blacks in contempt and supported sterilisation of the mentally incompetent. He believed - Mukerjee concludes, referring to Lindemann's lecture on Eugenics - that Science could yield a race of humans blessed with 'the mental make-up of the worker bee'....At the lower end of the race and class spectrum, one could remove the ability to suffer or to feel ambition....Instead of subscribing to what he called 'the fetish of equality', Lindemann recommended that human differences should be accepted and indeed enhanced by means of science. It was no longer necessary, he wrote, to wait for 'the haphazard process of natural selection to ensure that the slow and heavy mind gravitates to the lowest form of activity.

Lindemann's wide interests in physics were reflected in the Lindemann electrometer (in which he perceived the advantages of reducing instrument size), Lindemann glass for transmitting X rays, the Dobson-Lindemann theory of the upper atmosphere, indeterminacy, chemical kinetics, and, with Aston in 1919, the separation of isotopes. While serving as paymaster general during World War II, he proved the prime-number theorem by a new argument. The task of building up the Clarendon Laboratory in a difficult environment took effort that would otherwise have earned him a greater place in personal research; but his ideas illuminated many fields of physics at the pioneering stage. Beyond this, his achievements lie in the success of the laboratory and in the help that he gave Churchill.

Membership

• Royal Society of London , United Kingdom

  1920

Personality

Lindemann was a teetotaler, non-smoker and a vegetarian, although Churchill would sometimes induce him to take a glass of brandy. Lindemann was an excellent pianist, and sufficiently able as a tennis player to compete at Wimbledon. He believed that a small circle of the intelligent and the aristocratic should run the world, resulting in a peaceable and stable society, "led by supermen and served by helots." Sometimes thought to be anti-democratic, insensitive and elitist.

Connections

Lindemann was popular with women, but never married. He had no great loves, and few friends other than Churchill.

Father:

Adolph Friedrich Lindemann

Lindemann was a British engineer, businessman, and amateur astronomer of German origin.

Mother:

Olga Noble

Friend:

Winston Churchill

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography Volume 7
  1973
• Churchill's Bomb: How the United States Overtook Britain in the First Nuclear Arms Race Perhaps no scientific development has shaped the course of modern history as much as the harnessing of nuclear energy. Yet, the twentieth century might have turned out differently had greater influence over this technology been exercised by Great Britain, whose scientists were at the forefront of research into nuclear weapons at the beginning of World War II.
  2013
• The Prof in two worlds; the official life of Professor F.A. Lindemann, Viscount Cherwell
  1961
• Most Secret War. British Scientific Intelligence 1939-1945
  1978